What are good techniques to provide initial data to the key value store?

[halr9000]

Let's say I'm building an app, and I have data which needs to be loaded into the KV store once the app is installed. I also want to be careful about anything happening automatically, because a reinstall or upgrade will clobber any data already in there.

Question #1: How can I automate the initial load as much as possible?
Question #2: How can I prevent overwriting existing data in an upgrade scenario?

What are some good techniques?

[joxley]

Extending from @halr9000's answer

You can do a lookup on itself and exclude results that are already in the lookup_name lookup.

| inputlookup filename.csv | lookup lookup_name identity_column OUTPUT identity_column as found_id | search NOT found_id=* | outputlookup lookup_name

The | search NOT found_id=* will show all events that do not have a found_id field.

This has the downside that if your users delete records from the lookup, you'll re-add them.

Another option would be to ship filename_v1.csv and filename_v2.csv then do a similar thing there to seed the lookup.

[halr9000]

One way would be to ship your initial data as a CSV file, and then import the data using inputlookup and outputlookup. Here is a sample search from this migrate to KV store page:

| inputlookup filename.csv | outputlookup lookup_name

Care would need to be taken to ensure that the operation isn't performed a second time, or the data would be overwritten.