Hi guys,
I was of course thinking about some feature to enable loading data automatically during outages.
Unfortunately I personally dont see any way of doing this technically.
First problem - the API uses HTTP GET request. This means the data is sent via URL and the length is limited, it is perfectly fine for one data set, maybe two or three would be fine as well, but thats like 3 minutes of data... no way you could send hundreds of data sets via URL
Second problem - the communication is always one-way. SW->MT. A desktop program can send data to the internet, but a webpage cannot send anything to a SW, which is a problem again because the template would somehow have to let the SW know what the last record in the db is.
Third problem - each SW works differently (and MT now supports over 10...) and as you know, you have to set up the parameters and then also you see on the screen what is happening so you have some way of telling what happened and can check if it proceeded ok. If it "somehow" happened in the background you never know if something was sent, if it was correctly saved etc.
But the primary issue is the problem number 1. Long files also can time-out so you see that on the screen and repeat the import which then imports the rest, but if it was automatic it is again a problem because of the inability of MT (or webpage in general) to communicate back and report what happened.
Last but not least, one of the goals of the API was to get rid of any CRON jobs, FTPs etc. These are always difficult for users to understand, set up and FTP is slow and unreliable compared to HTTP GET request.