Import-VmsHardware needs improvement

[joshooaj]

The Import-VmsHardware command enables you to import cameras (and other hardware) from a CSV file, but the CSV file format is not good, and it's difficult to know which rows failed. This command needs to be re-written to reduce friction and make it more useful for everyone.

The Import-VmsHardwareExcel command solves some of the problems but introduces some new ones. Here are a few of the design considerations I have in mind. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please share them here so we can incorporate them into the next revision of the command.

Desired features

• Consider supporting both excel and csv format, with excel being used for more complex configuration imports.
• Human-friendly CSV file format enabling definition of one camera (or other device) channel per row. This means multi-channel cameras (multiple imagers, or virtual cameras, or analog video channels) would be represented on their own rows instead of being compressed into a single row per IP address.
• Improved Excel format for more complex imports covering as much of the device configuration as the MIP SDK / Configuration API allows, but design it so that we don't have to do a find & replace in the workbook in order to rename hardware or recording servers or devices for instance.
• Import new hardware, and import changes to existing hardware.
• Return objects that provide the information needed to understand which devices added successfully, which didn't, and why.