Professional PHP Design Patterns

22.1. Information Preparation

The requirements stated that any user of the application would need to import their contacts from the company's existing contact management software, Microsoft Outlook. Early in the plan, I made an assumption that this would be processed as a comma-separated value export.

In this case study, the company is using Outlook 2007 on Microsoft Windows. In order to produce my testing .csv file, I used the following process:

1. Open Microsoft Outlook 2007.

2. Click File Import and Export ...

3. Choose the Export to a file option from the Import and Export Wizard window.

4. Click the Next button.

5. Choose the Comma Separated Values (DOS) option.

6. Click the Next button.

7. Select the Contacts item under the Personal Folders parent item.

8. Click the Next button,

9. Type a location and name in the field labeled with Save exported file as. I used "c:\test.csv."

10. Click the Next button.

11. Click the Finish button to complete the process.

After this process, a new test .csv file should have been made. This is the process the users of the application would need to follow before they could choose to import their contacts.

The actual export file I'm going to use for testing has far too many columns to insert into the body of this book easily. (It can be downloaded with the other program files on this book's companion website.) However, for reference purposes while programming, I'll show a few excerpts from ...