Dumping a Previous Batch Import

In the previous post we looked at how windEPAF exports a template spreadsheet for users to fill out and then import using epaf_export.py and epaf_import.py respectively. Now we will examine the third component of windEPAF that allows us to produce a fully populated spreadsheet ready to be modified and imported.

So the question is, "why would you want to do this?" One reason is that you may have just imported a batch of EPAFs and once they were imported you realize you need to make a change. If you like monotony, you can always visit dozens or even hundreds of EPAFs making the same change over and over. But since I have a severe allergic reaction to monotony, we can dump out a previous import into Excel, fix the problem in a few seconds and update the original EPAFs by re-importing our spreadsheet.

So how does it work? We simply run epaf_dump.py using one of the transaction numbers from the previous batch as our reference transaction. WindEPAF will dump out all of the EPAF transactions that were processed in the same batch. So if our original transaction numbers were 1120 to 1150 we could simply export them like so.

> epaf_dump.py -t 1123

![dumped spreadsheet] (https://sourceforge.net/p/windepaf/screenshot/windEPAF_dump.png)

The spreadsheet will have all of the values that are in the EPAFs. After corrections are made, the spreadsheet is imported as before. Only instead of new EPAFs being created, the old ones are updated. Any EPAFs that have had approvals in NORROUT will be ignored (you will get a message in the logs) and if there are any records on the spreadsheet that you don't want to be updated, you can remove an entry in one of the required fields (id, posn, suff, effective_date) and they will be ignored.