{"id":1606,"date":"2014-03-11T21:25:13","date_gmt":"2014-03-11T20:25:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/?p=1606"},"modified":"2014-03-11T21:25:13","modified_gmt":"2014-03-11T20:25:13","slug":"automatic-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/2014\/03\/automatic-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Automatic love"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think more people in libraries should learn scripting skills – that is how to write short computer programmes. The reason is simple – because it can help you do things quickly and easily that would otherwise be time consuming and dull. This is probably the main \u00a0reason I started to use code and scripts in my work, and if you ever find yourself doing a job regularly that is time consuming and\/or dull and thinking ‘there must be a better way to do this’ it may well be a good project for learning to code.<\/span><\/p>\n

To give and example. I work on ‘Knowledgebase+’ (KB+) – a shared service for electronic resource management run by Jisc in the UK. KB+ holds details on a whole range of electronic journals and related information including details of organisations providing or using the resources.<\/p>\n

I’ve just been passed the details of 79 new organisations to be added to the system. To create these normally would require a couple of pieces of information (including the name of the organisation) into a web form and click ‘submit’.<\/p>\n

While not the worst nor the most time consuming job in the world, it seemed like something that could be made quicker and easier through a short piece of code. If I do this in a sensible way, next time there is a list of organisations to add to the system, I can just re-use the same code to do the job again.<\/p>\n

Luckily I’d already been experimenting with automating some processes in KB+ so I had a head start, leaving me with just three things to do:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Write code to extract the organisation name from the list I’d been given<\/li>\n
  2. Find out how the ‘create organisation’ form in KB+ worked<\/li>\n
  3. Write code to replicate this process that could take the organisation name and other data as input, and create an organisation on KB+<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I’d been given the original list as a spreadsheet, so I just exported the list of organisation names as a csv to make it easy to read programmatically, after that writing code that opened the file, read a line at a time and found the name was trivial:<\/p>\n

    CSV.foreach(orgfile, :headers => true, :header_converters => :symbol) do |row|\r\n    org_name = row[:name]\r\nend<\/pre>\n
    The code to trigger the creation of the organisation in KB+ was a simple http ‘POST’ command (i.e. it is just a simple web form submission). The code I’d written previously essentially ‘faked’ a browser session and logged into KB+ (I did this using a code library called ‘mechanize’ which is specially designed for this type of thing), so it was simply a matter of finding the relevant URL and parameters for the ‘post’. I used the handy Firefox extension ‘Tamper Data’ which allows you to see (and adjust) ‘POST’ and ‘GET’ requests sent from your browser – which allowed me to see the relevant information.<\/p>\n
    \"Screenshot<\/a><\/p>\n
    The relevant details here are the URL at the top right of the form, and the list of ‘parameters’ on the right.\u00a0<\/span>Since I’d already got the code that dealt with authentication, the code to carryout this ‘post’ request looks like this<\/p>\n
    page = @magent.post(url, {\r\n  \"name\" => org_name,\r\n  \"sector\" => org_sector\r\n  })\r\nend<\/pre>\n
    So – I’ve written less than 10 new lines of code and I’ve got everything I need to automate the creation of organisations in KB+ given a list in a CSV file.<\/p>\n
    Do you have any jobs that involve dull, repetitive tasks? Ever find yourself re-keying bits of data? Why not learn to code?<\/p>\n
    P.S. If you work on Windows, try looking at tools like MacroExpress<\/a>\u00a0or AutoHotKey<\/a>, especially if ‘learning to code’ sounds too daunting\/time-consuming<\/p>\n
    P.P.S. Perfection is the enemy of the good – try to avoid getting yourself into an XKCD ‘pass the salt’<\/a> situation<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
    I think more people in libraries should learn scripting skills – that is how to write short computer programmes. The reason is simple – because it can help you do things quickly and easily that would otherwise be time consuming and dull. This is probably the main \u00a0reason I started to use code and scripts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1606"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1609,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606\/revisions\/1609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}