Multi-Subscriber mass update dashboard

Question

I am looking to create a dashboard for some of my team that are not very tech savvy that will let them manipulate and view all the data from certain data extensions from our email sends in Exact Target. I have had no issues with populating the dashboard with the information, the issue I come into is that the only way I can figure out easily to allow updates is to make each row its own form with a 'submit changes' button to the right of each one. This is fine for small changes, but when you need to do a mass update this is a grueling and time consuming process.

I was hoping someone could point me in the general direction of what I should be looking at doing to allow multi-subscriber updates with one submit. For instance, should I make this all a single form with one submit button using HTTPPost? should it even be a form or should I make it more javascript based?

Any direction and information would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You could do this either method you mention. I would suggest not isolating each item into it's own form. You are correct - that is tedious and can cause errors.

One potential method that has worked for me in the past would be to set up a processing page that you can submit the form to using an AJAX call.

Since each page is HTML based, you can do any JavaScript interactions as normal. Also, you might want to look at FuelUX to implement some of the items like data grids, etc.

Dashboard

On this page - set up some manner of displaying the records. This page will hold serve your javascript files. The page can be as dynamic as you need, but I would suggest having some sort of flag that indicates a subscriber record has been changed, and unsaved.

Use one save button to find all changed/unsaved subscribers and submit to process page, possibly as a loop - depends on how much data needs to be passed and the methods you want to submit it as.

You might also do the changes instantly with out an actual save button - maybe each subscriber has an edit button that brings up an edit mode with an ok button. When ok is clicked, it's sent to the process page.

Process Page

This is all AMPscript and would expect the payload to be subscriber based - and perform updates to that subscriber.

Since you can use any front end technology - jQuery is usually a great option to do this sort of thing, and on submit of the subscriber - you can easily pass it to the processing page.