This project was amended by BRISSKit in order to facilitate the processing of an appointments' list passed across 
as an excel spreadsheet. 

Jira issue ONYX-1682 was raised with Obiba as a result of this problem

Modules changed:
org.obiba.onyx.core.etl.participant.impl.AbstractParticipantReader
org.obiba.onyx.core.etl.participant.impl.DeleteUnreceivedParticipantsTasklet
org.obiba.onyx.core.etl.participant.impl.AppointmentListUpdateListener

This was the description of the problem as passed to Obiba...

I want to drop an Excel spreadsheet (ie: an appointments' list) into Onyx more frequently than once a day. 
I want to do this via another system using a web service. I've designed the web service which correctly 
formats a spreadsheet and drops it in the configured WEBINF/appointments/in directory. 
I've configured Onyx to run the appointment lists' cron job every so often (say once an hour) instead 
of at 4am as the default currently is with the onyx-demo system. 

By the way, I'm using the onyx-demo war file, so it is version v1.8.1-b11948.

Everything works fine for the first cron invocation after starting Tomcat, with the job finishing 
with a status of [COMPLETED]. That's really good! But the second and subsequent invocations fail 
to pick up any new spreadsheet dropped into the WEBINF/appointments/in directory; 
the logs show that the failing job finishes with a status of [UNKNOWN]. 
However, if I then restart Tomcat, the first cron job after restarting picks up the new spreadsheet 
and processes it correctly, but subsequent cron jobs still fail to pick up any further new spreadsheets. 
So it requires me to force a restart of Tomcat in order to pick up a new spreadsheet!   :-(

On a failure, I have tried to trigger the process manually as administrator within the Onyx webapp gui, 
but get the message "No appointment list update file available".