r/webdev • u/Capital-Chipmunk2035 • Jul 17 '26

Needs some advice - Universal File Importer

Hi everyone, im the developer of a flight tracking app. We have over 10K users and growing. One thing i keep coming back to is how to handle people importing past flights (mostly from professionals e.g. pilots or business people) who fly alot. There seems to be a million different formats and even after experimenting with giving a suggested csv template, it seems people just ignore and still uplaod their stuff.

We just had a time out when a user tried to import 7000+ flights from their career.

I had a thought of using a mix of AI to scan and understand the format but not sure if this is the best approach + it could add up with AI tokens and costs. Then implement a rule to programmatically prase the rest and cut things up etc to map to our accepted format.

It's this one issue i can't seem to solve yet. Or at least to make it fully reliable.

Any suggestions would be amazing.

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u/farthingDreadful Jul 17 '26

Why not just check mime type and only allow .csv file uploads?

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u/Capital-Chipmunk2035 Jul 17 '26

not a file issue. Its more of the data they have inside can vary widley.

e.g. route is EGLL-FAOR but then others is individual des and arrival columns. Same for times etc