mine_shaft

h1. MineShaft: Seed data from your stakeholders

h2. Overview

MineShaft uses @mechanize@ to walk through a Remine project site and parse content which can't be easily accessed via the REST API (yet). The gem also provides a simple way to deserialize an HTML table into an Array of Hash objects which are key-value pairs of the table heading(s) and the corresponding value for each row in the table.

h2. Motivation

We were looking for some domain-specific information to work with in an application and wanted to feed off of the knowledge of some of our stakeholders. We didn't want to build out an admin interface which would be replaced with an automated system down the road and having our users edit text files and send them to us was not going to work. We created a @Seed_Data@ wiki page and threw in a few tables with ID's and wrote MineShaft to parse those tables and convert them into Hashes we could use to add/update content in the application database. Using this method allow(s) us to spread data entry & review requests for to a wide variety of people in an efficient manner.

h2. Usage

Assuming you have a Redmine installation set up at @http://your.rm-install.com@ and a project named @twitter4biz@ set up.

Given a wiki page titled "Seed_Data" with the following table definition somewhere in that page (note: the table ID must be present):

bc. table(#companies). |Ticker|Name | |AAPL |Apple | |MSFT |Microsoft| |GOOG |Google | |YHOO |Yahoo |

Then in IRB (or whatever):

bc. require 'mine_shaft' include MineShaft shaft = Shaft.new('rm-username', 'rm-password', 'http://your.rm-install.com') companies = shaft.grab("companies", '/projects/twitter4biz/wiki/Seed_Data') => [{:name => 'Apple', :ticker => 'AAPL'}, {:name => 'Microsoft', :ticker => 'MSFT'},...]

So, in the db/seeds.rb file of your Rails app, you could put something like the following (assuming you have also included the previous code example):

bc. companies.each do |attributes| company = Company.find_by_ticker(attributes[:ticker]) if company.nil? Company.create!(attributes) puts "Added '#{attributes[:ticker]}'" else ticker = attributes.delete(:ticker) company.update(attributes) puts "Updated '#{ticker}'" end end

...and then run:

bc. rake db:seed

h2. Installation

bc. gem install mine_shaft

h2. Contributing

Fork it...

bundle install

...make awesomeness

Commit (ideally) to a feature-branch

Send a pull request

h2. Found a bug?

File an issue on the project's "issues page":https://github.com/tomkersten/mine_shaft/issues

h2. Dependencies

• mechanize

h2. License

Refer to LICENSE file (hint: MIT)

h2. Future Plans

The gem is meeting our needs at the moment, so we don't have any plans to add significant functionality at the moment. However, it has come in quite handy so far, so we may end up expanding it further if a new need arises.