So this year, within a few hours of first asking for it, I got a nice CSV file of our inventory from the Business Office (thanks, Matt). It included lines like Man, I love Python. There’s a built-in CSV module<\/a> that parses lines into lists, and separates values on each line into separate items in those lists. No parsing required on my part. There’s a nice third-party module for generating HTML markup (original site is down, but see this link from archive.org<\/a> for the module). And it’s a mature enough language to where a years-old Usenet post on sorting<\/a> is still useful.<\/p>\n On a procedural rather than technical front, I started going around a couple of years ago and snapping pictures of items as I inventoried them. The old camera-phone pictures aren’t great, but they’re good enough to identify an item and find its property tag. So now I had a table of inventory data, and a big folder of JPGs named according to the item’s property tag. So now to convert them into useful web pages: Once this script has run, I have two web pages of the same inventory data: one sorted by location, and another by property tag. I generally only use the location-sorted one, though. The CSS tries to force page breaks every two items, and judicious use of landscape printing and a bit of scaling in Firefox means I can carry around 40 pages of my report and find everything I need pretty quickly. One good thing about the switch from the legacy administrative computing system to the new Banner setup is now I can more easily get an unformatted table of my department’s equipment inventory instead of a printed report. This matters to me for a few reasons: The default inventory reports always come out sorted by inventory … <\/p>\n
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\n74396,\"Fork Lift, Electric\",SU 803647,F30,CATERPILLAR,5\/1\/2001,CH106,13900,Center for Manufacturing Research,6700
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\nthat I could work with. I had text files from previous years on the old system, but they were much weirder to parse. This opened right up in Excel without issue, so I had hope for a much cleaner implementation of my old Python inventory scripts.<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n\nimport csv\nimport os\nimport string\nfrom HyperText.XHTML import TABLE, TR, TH, TD, IMG, DIV, HEAD, STYLE, BR\nfrom HyperText.Documents import Document\n\nnotesDict = {\n '064286':'(2007) Surplused',\n }\n\n\n\"\"\"A set of comparer classes.\"\"\"\n## http:\/\/groups.google.com\/group\/comp.lang.python\/msg\/42b5a84450278ab2\n\nclass CmpComposite:\n \"\"\"Takes a list of compare functions and sorts in that order.\"\"\"\n def __init__(self,*comparers):\n self.comparers=comparers\n def __call__(self,a,b):\n for cmp in self.comparers:\n c=cmp(a,b)\n if c:\n return c\n return 0\n\nclass CmpInverse:\n \"\"\"Inverses the effect of a cmp.\"\"\"\n def __init__(self,cmp):\n self.cmp=cmp\n def __call__(self,a,b):\n return -self.cmp(a,b)\n\nclass CmpColumn:\n \"\"\"Sorts on an index of a sequence.\"\"\"\n def __init__(self,column):\n self.column=column\n def __call__(self,a,b):\n return cmp(a[self.column],b[self.column])\n \nclass CmpAttr:\n \"\"\"Sorts on an attribute.\"\"\"\n def __init__(self, attr):\n self.attr = attr\n def __call__(self, x, y):\n return cmp(getattr(x, self.attr), getattr(y, self.attr))\n\nreader=csv.reader(open('inventory_control_listing_13900.csv','rb'))\nequipmentList = []\nfor row in reader:\n (tag, description, serial, model, manufacturer, arrival,\n location, code, department, cost) = row\n equipmentList.append((tag, description, serial, model, manufacturer,\n arrival, location, cost))\n\nfor sortBy in ['tag', 'location']:\n if sortBy=='tag':\n equipmentList.sort(CmpColumn(0))\n elif sortBy=='location':\n equipmentList.sort(CmpColumn(6))\n\n outFilename = \"by-%s.html\" % (sortBy)\n print\n print \"Would print to %s\" % (outFile)\n print\n \n n=0\n seenTags = []\n inventoryTableList=DIV()\n for equipmentItem in equipmentList:\n (itemTag, itemDescription, itemSerial, itemModel, itemManufacturer,\n itemArrival, itemLocation, itemCost) = equipmentItem\n\n try:\n seenTags.index(itemTag)\n except ValueError:\n seenTags.append(itemTag)\n n=n+1\n if (n%2)==0:\n inventoryTable=TABLE(border='1',style='page-break-after: always')\n else:\n inventoryTable=TABLE(border='1')\n\n headerRow=TR()\n headerRow.append(TH('Tag'))\n headerRow.append(TH('Item Description'))\n headerRow.append(TH('Serial Number'))\n headerRow.append(TH('Model Number'))\n headerRow.append(TH('Arrival'))\n headerRow.append(TH('Manufacturer'))\n headerRow.append(TH('Location'))\n headerRow.append(TH('Cost'))\n inventoryTable.append(headerRow)\n\n itemRow=TR()\n if itemTag[0] in string.digits:\n itemTag=''.join(['0',itemTag])\n itemRow.append(TD(itemTag,align='right'))\n itemRow.append(TD(itemDescription))\n itemRow.append(TD(itemSerial))\n itemRow.append(TD(itemModel))\n itemRow.append(TD(itemArrival,align='right'))\n itemRow.append(TD(itemManufacturer))\n itemRow.append(TD(itemLocation,align='center'))\n itemRow.append(TD(\"$%.2f\" % (float(itemCost)),align='right'))\n inventoryTable.append(itemRow)\n\n imageRow=TR()\n if os.path.exists(\"%s.jpg\" % itemTag):\n imageRow.append(TD(IMG(src=\"%s.jpg\" % itemTag),\n colspan=4,align='center',width='640'))\n else:\n imageRow.append(TD(IMG(src=\"missing.gif\"),\n colspan=4,align='center',width='640'))\n\n if os.path.exists(\"%s-detail.jpg\" % itemTag):\n imageRow.append(TD(IMG(src=\"%s-detail.jpg\" % itemTag),\n colspan=4,align='center',width='640'))\n else:\n imageRow.append(TD(IMG(src=\"missing.gif\"),\n colspan=4,align='center',width='640'))\n\n inventoryTable.append(imageRow)\n\n notesRow=TR()\n if notesDict.has_key(itemTag):\n notesRow.append(TD(\"Notes: %s\" % notesDict[itemTag],colspan=8))\n else:\n notesRow.append(TD(\"Notes:\",colspan=8))\n\n inventoryTable.append(notesRow)\n\n inventoryTableList.append(inventoryTable)\n inventoryTableList.append(BR())\n\n head=HEAD()\n head.append(STYLE(type='text\/css'))\n htmlOutput=Document(head,inventoryTableList)\n htmlFile=open(outFilename,'w+')\n htmlOutput.writeto(htmlFile)\n htmlFile.close()\n<\/pre>\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"