Import into Your REST API — CSV, Excel & PDF

• Overview
• From
• Into

Importing for your users — or for yourself?

Adding import to your own product? This page is the generic guide: your users bring files, Mildport handles parse → map → validate, and your API keeps owning the write. Read on.

Stuck with a system whose importer is old? The system is fine and it has an API; getting files into it is the problem — renamed headers, merged columns, a PDF where a spreadsheet should be. See the wizard handle genuinely messy files in the playground (free, no signup). And a run-it-yourself importer is in the works: your own API credentials, runs on your machine, every row staged for review before a single write is made. Join the waitlist.

Goal: your users bring the file they have — CSV, Excel, even a PDF or a scan — and clean records land in your own REST API without leaving your product, and without you writing a mapping/validation UI. The pattern is the same every time: embed → validate → deliver. Mildport handles the first two; your webhook handler owns the write into your own REST API.

1. Embed the importer

<mildport-import
  api-base-url="https://imports.your-infra.example"
  license-key="SIGNED_TENANT_KEY"
  catalog-key="contacts"
></mildport-import>

2. Publish a catalog that mirrors your own REST API

The schema lives in a target catalog, not in host code. Create it in the catalog editor (/admin/catalogs on your engine, or embed <mildport-catalog-editor>), draft it from your OpenAPI spec or a sample JSON record, and publish. The widget loads that published catalog by catalog-key.

Whatever your API accepts — contacts, products, transactions — becomes the catalog. Required fields on the catalog are the ones your API would 400; the review step then guarantees the webhook payload is insertable.

Users then upload anything — renamed headers, six languages, XLSX/ODS, even PDF tables — and Mildport’s deterministic matcher plus the review step produce typed, validated rows.

Need the schema computed per user at runtime, or versioned with your app? That’s the schema-as-code path — pass targets from host code instead of catalog-key.

3. Deliver from your webhook

Clean rows arrive on your signed apply webhook; your handler writes to your own REST API:

POST /api/v1/contacts/batch on YOUR backend — the webhook handler is ~20 lines: verify signature, map rows, call your service layer

Your own REST API-specific gotchas

• make the handler idempotent (the apply webhook retries): an import id + upsert semantics beats hoping for exactly-once.
• return per-row failures to a dead-letter list instead of failing the batch — users fixed 9,990 rows; don’t lose them over 10.
• version the payload you accept; the import contract will outlive your current schema.

Why not hand-rolled import?

You could build the upload → parse → map → validate pipeline yourself — teams do, and then spend quarters on encodings, dialects and mapping UX. Embedding buys the whole front half; your API keeps owning the write.

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Try the flow first: the playground (no signup), then the Quickstart and target catalogs. Prices are published — hosted and flat-annual self-host — at mildport.com/#pricing.