Django Request input from User
I'm having a Django stack process issue and am wondering if there's a way to request user input.
To start with, the user is loading Sample data (Oxygen, CHL, Nutrients, etc.) which typically comes from an excel file. The user clicks on a button indicating what type of sample is being loaded on the webpage and gets a dialog to choose the file to load. The webpage passes the file to python via VueJS/Django where python passes the file down to the appropriate parser to read that specific sample type. The file is processed and sample data is written to a database.
Issues (I.E sample ID is outside an expected range of IDs because it was keyed in wrong when the sample was taken) get passed back to the webpage as well as written to the database to tell the user when something happened:
(E.g "No Bottle exists for sample with ID 495619, expected range is 495169 - 495176" or "356 is an unreasonable salinity, check data for sample 495169"). Maybe there's fifty samples without bottle IDs because the required bottle file wasn't loaded before the sample data. Generally you have one big 10L bottle with water in it, the ocean depth (pressure) and bottle ID where the bottle was closed is in a bottle file, and samples are placed into different vials with that bottle's unique id and the vials are run thought different machines and tests to produce the sample files.
My issue occurs when the user picks a file that contains data that has already been loaded. If the filename matches the existing file data was loaded from I clear data associated with that file and reload the database with the new data, sometimes data is spread over several files that were already loaded and uploader will merge all the files, including some that weren't uploaded, together.
A protocol for uploading data is for the uploader to append/prepend their initials onto a copy of a file if corrections were made and not to modify the original file; a chain of custody. Sometimes a file can be modified by multiple people and each person will create a copy and append/prepend their initials so people will know who all touched the data. (I don't make the rules I just work with what I have)
So we get all the way back to the parser and it's discovered the data already exists (for a given sample ID), but the filename is different. At this point I want to ask the user, do you want to reload all the data loaded from the other file, update existing data with the new file or ignore existing data and only append new data.
Is there a way for Django to make a request to the webpage to ask the user how it should handle this data without having to terminate the current request? - which the webpage is waiting for a response from the server to say the data was loaded and what errors with the data might have been found -
My current thoughts are to:
Ask the user before every file upload how a collision should be handled, if it happens
Or
Abort the data load, pass an error with a code back to the webpage, the error code indicates to the webpage that the user has to decide what to do. Upon the user answering, the load process is restarted with the same file, but with a flag to tell the parser what to do when the issue is eventually encountered again.
Nothing is written to the database until a whole file is read so no problem aborting the process and restarting if the parser doesn't know what to do, but I feel like there might be a better way.