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Generic Exporter API Service

Had a quick idea after having to build about 8 of these things during my programming career and wanted feedback to see if anyone or any businesses would find it useful and most importantly how much you would pay for it.

The idea is an API that can be sent data and it will generate you and export as either a CSV, PDF or Excel file.
Here's how it would work

  • A customer would get the data they wanted to export on their side, they would then call our API with the type of export required and the data they previously acquired.
  • The API would generate the export, save it to S3, and then send a signed URL back
  • The customer can then download this file and send it to the end user

The options for the API would be the tricky part, for PDF's they could pass HTML or a URL to render as a PDF. However, for CSV and Excel, they'd provide an XML or JSON body of data and then we'd render it as is. Perhaps there would be options to order data in a certain way. What options would you expect here?

The use case is for a lot of business backend systems, they required exports into different formats for different departments.

To my knowledge there is no decent API that fulfills these export requirements. There are some for PDF's but after trying some of them, they don't work great.

I'd appreciate your thoughts, telling my I'm dumb or pointing me to a place where it's been done already. Thanks!

on June 5, 2020
  1. 1

    Just checking in to say I think this is a pretty clever idea!

    I work at a pretty large bank - it wouldn't surprise me if there are multiple departments either doing this type of work manually or using an 'export' feature that's tightly coupled to whatever piece of vendor bloat they're paying for.

    1. 1

      Hmm thanks a lot for this feedback! It's definitely a product I'm going to pursue. What kind of formats do you export from and to?
      I was thinking of supporting XML, YAML, JSON, XLSX (Excel), PDF and CSV - would that suit your needs?

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