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Bulk JSON Import Progress Agent Skill

Import thousands of rows from a user-supplied file without the UI going dark or the batch dying halfway — chunk the writes and emit progress per chunk, reject a parse that yields nothing before touching the database, and filter incoming rows down to those whose referenced parents exist. Use when building an import/restore feature, when an import of a large file appears frozen, or when a single bad row aborts a whole import.

2k tokens
context cost
the whole folder, loaded on every use
1
files
instructions only
0
copies elsewhere
how many repositories repackaged it
100
stars on the repo
on the repository, not the skill itself

Install

one command, takes just this skill from the repository
npx skills add https://github.com/maxrave-dev/kotlin-footguns --skill bulk-json-import-progress

The instruction itself

3 sections, as written by the author

Importing a large file into a local database

The whole operation is one cold flow that emits a small sealed progress type. The caller collects

it; nothing else needs to know how the work is split.

sealed interface ImportProgress {
    data object Preparing : ImportProgress
    data class Importing(val processed: Int, val total: Int) : ImportProgress
    data class Success(val result: ImportResult) : ImportProgress
    data class Error(val message: String) : ImportProgress
}

override fun import(json: String, invalidFileMessage: String): Flow<ImportProgress> = flow {
    emit(ImportProgress.Preparing)
    …
}.flowOn(Dispatchers.IO)

Four phases, in this order: parse → sanity-check → write songs in chunks → write playlists.

Nothing touches the database until the first two have passed.

Traps

A file that parses but carries nothing is the wrong file, and reporting success is the worst outcome. With unknown keys ignored

— which you want, so a newer producer's file still imports — *any* JSON object decodes into an all-defaults envelope. Check before writing:

if (data.songs.isEmpty() && data.playlists.isEmpty()) {
    emit(ImportProgress.Error(invalidFileMessage)); return@flow
}

A crash gets reported. "Imported 0 songs" does not: the user believes it worked and deletes the source file.

Row-at-a-time writing is not slow because of the rows, it is slow because of the commits. If no DAO method takes a list and

there is no ambient transaction, ten thousand inserts are ten thousand commits. Chunk them, and let the chunk size be the emit interval too:

private const val SONG_BATCH_SIZE = 500

var written = 0
data.songs.chunked(SONG_BATCH_SIZE).forEach { chunk ->
    localDataSource.insertSongs(chunk.map { it.toSongEntity() })   // @Transaction
    written += chunk.size
    emit(ImportProgress.Importing(processed = written, total = total))
}

Emit per chunk, never per row. One emission per row floods a StateFlow-backed UI with updates it conflates away anyway, and

the collection overhead can cost more than the inserts. Twenty emissions across a ten-thousand-row import is a smooth progress bar.

Filter incoming references down to parents that exist, before inserting the children. A child row pointing at a parent that is

not in the file will be rejected by the foreign key — and because the parent insert is inside a transaction, that one bad reference

takes the whole playlist with it. Build the lookup once and filter:

val songsById = data.songs.associateBy { it.videoId }          // once, not per playlist
val videoIds = playlist.videoIds.filter { songsById.containsKey(it) }
skippedEntries += playlist.videoIds.size - videoIds.size

associateBy up front is what keeps this linear; data.songs.any { … } inside the filter would make it quadratic and turn a fast

import into a hang at exactly the sizes that matter.

Renumber after filtering, or the gaps become real. Positions come from the index in the *filtered* list, so they stay contiguous

from 0. Taking the index from the original list leaves holes wherever a reference was dropped, and every later "insert at position n" is then wrong.

Count what you skipped and report it. skippedEntries is the difference between what the file

asked for and what was written. Surfacing it is the only way a half-empty playlist is a known

outcome rather than a mystery — and it is the signal that tells you the *producer* has a bug, not

the importer.

Wrap the write phase so a failure becomes an emission, not an escaped exception. A flow that

throws leaves the collector to handle it, and most collectors do not:

runCatching { /* all writes; returns ImportResult */ }
    .onSuccess { emit(ImportProgress.Success(it)) }
    .onFailure { emit(ImportProgress.Error(it.message ?: invalidFileMessage)) }

Note that the parse failure earlier reports the caller-supplied message, while a write failure

reports the underlying one — the user can act on "not a valid file" and cannot act on a parser's

offset, but a write failure is the one you need described when they report it.

The message text comes from the caller. Localized strings live in the app module, which the data

module does not depend on. Passing invalidFileMessage in keeps the dependency arrow pointing the

right way; building the string in the repository is how the storage layer ends up depending on the

UI.

Normalize any value that arrives from outside, do not trust it. Fields written by another program are strings until proven otherwise:

videoType = MusicVideoType.normalize(videoType) ?: ""

A real known value is kept, anything else becomes the "unknown" the column already uses and is filled in later from the source of

truth. Storing the raw string means every consumer must now handle whatever the producer invented.

Enforce a parallel-array length rule at the boundary. Where two lists are aligned by index,

keep the second only when it matches:

artistId = artistId?.takeIf { it.size == (artistName?.size ?: 0) }

Anything else reads past the end of the shorter list later, far from the import, where nothing suggests a file was involved.

Pick the chunk size against a real file, and measure both halves. Too small and you pay for

commits; too large and one transaction holds a long write lock and the progress bar stalls in

visible steps. Verify by timing an import at your documented maximum — the caps the file format

promises are the size you must actually be fast at, not the size you tested with.

Verifying it

Run against core/data/src/commonMain/kotlin/com/maxrave/data/repository/ImportRepositoryImpl.kt from the repository root.

  • The batch-size constant drives both the chunk and the emit, and the lookup is built once:
   grep -n "SONG_BATCH_SIZE\|associateBy { it.videoId }" core/data/src/commonMain/kotlin/com/maxrave/data/repository/ImportRepositoryImpl.kt

Pass condition: one private const val SONG_BATCH_SIZE, consumed by the same .chunked(...) that drives the Importing(processed, total) emit; associateBy appears once, outside any per-playlist loop.

  • The two boundary guards are verbatim, not paraphrased:
   grep -n 'MusicVideoType.normalize(videoType)\|artistId?.takeIf' core/data/src/commonMain/kotlin/com/maxrave/data/repository/ImportRepositoryImpl.kt

Pass condition: both lines are present — an unrecognised value falls back to "", and a mismatched-length array is dropped rather than read out of bounds later.

  • By hand: time an import at your documented maximum file size, not the size you tested with. A stall followed by a jump to 100% means the chunk size is too large to feel responsive at that size.

How to use it

Copy the folder

Take maxrave-dev/bulk-json-import-progress from the repository into ~/.claude/skills for personal use, or into .claude/skills inside a project.

Check the name does not clash

The agent identifies a skill by the name field in its header. Two skills with the same name cannot sit side by side — one of them will be ignored.