Developers of Sympa

[Adam Bernstein <address@concealed>]

Hey Jason -- I added the same feature on one of the systems we built, only 
I read the uploaded data directly into the "dump" variable in do_add() 
(which is populated by the add_request form) instead of calling an external 
system command to parse the data.  The code otherwise looks similar to 
yours, with the key difference being this little doodad:

        my $fh = $query->upload('uploaded_file');
        while (<$fh>) {
            $dump .= $_;
        }

Maybe a bit of simplification you can do too?

> I tried to upload about 65,000 emails and the web page gets directed to a
> "server error" page. Eventually all the emails get added to the list but I
> don't know if there is a way to keep that error page from displaying? 

I believe the Web server is just timing out the connection to the script, 
thinking that it's gone unresponsive, and you can control that by raising 
the -idle-timeout parameter on the FastCgiServer (or FastCgiConfig) line in 
httpd.conf -- I think we set ours to 5 or 10 minutes (300-600 seconds).

> Is there a way to kick off my system command (cat /tmp/my_import_file |
> /usr/lib/sympa/bin/sympa.pl --address@concealed) and have the script
> return to a page that says the upload is in progress?

Now that is a very good idea.  And might be easier with your architecture, 
using the external command, although I think the part that takes the most 
time where you would want the status monitor is on the actual 
browser-to-server upload call, not the parsing of the subscriber list.  I 
think monitoring that file upload would require a pretty low-level widget, 
and I don't know where you'd find such a thing, but somebody was just 
telling me about a library of such tools (must be PHP-based) that Drupal 
has started incorporating....

    ab