gocept.collmex 0.8

Python-bindings for the Collmex import/export API

Contents

• Introduction

• Collmex API

  • The collmex object

  • Transaction integration

  • Customers: create_customer and get_customers

  • Products: create_product and get_products

  • Invoices: create_invoice and get_invoices

  • Activities

    • Create an activity

    • Export using get_activities

  • Projects: get_projects

  • Caching

• Changes

  • 0.8 (2012-01-20)

  • 0.7 (2009-11-05)

  • 0.6 (2009-02-16)

  • 0.5.1 (2009-01-08)

  • 0.5 (2008-12-19)

  • 0.4 (2008-12-11)

  • 0.3.1 (2008-12-02)

  • 0.3 (2008-12-01)

  • 0.2 (2008-11-28)

  • 0.1 (2008-10-14)

Introduction

Collmex is an online ERP system for (small) companies with a focus on simple accounting. <http://www.collmex.de> (Note: Collmex is Germany-based but seems to support English. You’re bound to stumble over German strings, though.)

This package aims to provide pythonic bindings to program against Collmex’ API. It includes transaction management for integration with the ZODB or other databases that can integrate with the transaction package.

Collmex API

Collmex provides a POST- and CSV-based API, which is encapsulated into a utility that provides methods for the various CSV record types. API documentation is available at http://www.collmex.de/cgi-bin/cgi.exe?1005,1,help,api.

The collmex object

The collmex object is a central place to access collmex. In the Zope 3 jargon it is a global utility:

>>> import os
>>> import gocept.collmex.collmex
>>> collmex = gocept.collmex.collmex.Collmex(
...     os.environ['collmex_customer'], os.environ['collmex_company'],
...     os.environ['collmex_username'], os.environ['collmex_password'])

Transaction integration

gocept.collmex has support for transaction integration. All modifying calls are buffered until the transaction is commited. XXX explain more.

[1] [2]

>>> import transaction

Customers: create_customer and get_customers

>>> customer = gocept.collmex.model.Customer()
>>> customer['Kundennummer'] = 10000
>>> customer['Firma'] = 'Testkunden'
>>> collmex.create_customer(customer)
>>> transaction.commit()

Customers can be listed using the get_customers method:

>>> customers = collmex.get_customers()
>>> customers
[<gocept.collmex.model.Customer object at 0x...>,
 <gocept.collmex.model.Customer object at 0x...>]
>>> len(customers)
2

The first customer is the generic one:

>>> customer = customers[0]
>>> customer['Satzart']
u'CMXKND'
>>> customer['Kundennummer']
u'9999'
>>> customer['Firma']
u'Allgemeiner Gesch\xe4ftspartner'

The second customer is one created during test setup:

>>> customer = customers[1]
>>> customer['Satzart']
u'CMXKND'
>>> customer['Kundennummer']
u'10000'
>>> customer['Firma']
u'Testkunden'

Products: create_product and get_products

Products are created using the create_product method:

>>> product = gocept.collmex.model.Product()
>>> product['Produktnummer'] = 'TEST'
>>> product['Bezeichnung'] = 'Testprodukt'
>>> product['Produktart'] = 1 # Dienstleistung
>>> product['Basismengeneinheit'] = 'HR'
>>> product['Verkaufs-Preis'] = 5
>>> collmex.create_product(product)
>>> transaction.commit()
>>> collmex.get_products()[0]['Bezeichnung']
u'Testprodukt'

Invoices: create_invoice and get_invoices

Invoices are created using the create_invoice method:

>>> import datetime
>>> start_date = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> item = gocept.collmex.model.InvoiceItem()
>>> item['Kunden-Nr'] = '10000'
>>> item['Rechnungsnummer'] = 100000
>>> item['Menge'] = 3
>>> item['Produktnummer'] = 'TEST'
>>> item['Rechnungstext'] = u'item text \u2013 with non-ascii characters'
>>> item['Positionstyp'] = 0
>>> collmex.create_invoice([item])

Invoices can be looked up again, using the get_invoices method. However, as discussed above the invoice was only registered for addition. Querying right now does not return the invoice:

>>> collmex.get_invoices(customer_id='10000', start_date=start_date)
[]

After committing, the invoice is found:

>>> transaction.commit()
>>> collmex.get_invoices(customer_id='10000',
...                      start_date=start_date)[0]['Rechnungstext']
u'item text \u2013 with non-ascii characters'

Activities

This section describes the API for activities (Taetigkeiten erfassen)

Create an activity

A project with one set and an employee are required to submit activities:

>>> import datetime
>>> today = datetime.date.today()
>>> import gocept.collmex.testing
>>> gocept.collmex.testing.create_projects()
>>> gocept.collmex.testing.create_employee()
>>> act = gocept.collmex.model.Activity()
>>> act['Projekt Nr'] = '1' # Testprojekt
>>> act['Mitarbeiter Nr'] = '1' # Sebastian Wehrmann
>>> act['Satz Nr'] = '1' # TEST
>>> act['Beschreibung'] = u'allgemeine T\xe4tigkeit'
>>> act['Datum'] = today
>>> act['Von'] = datetime.time(8, 7)
>>> act['Bis'] = datetime.time(14, 28)
>>> act['Pausen'] = datetime.timedelta(hours=1, minutes=12)
>>> collmex.create(act)
>>> transaction.commit()

Export using get_activities

Caution: This method does not use the Collmex API as it does not provide this functionality. It uses a browser to navigate to the download in the UI and returns raw CSV data

>>> collmex.get_activities()
'Typkennung;Projekt;Mitarbeiter;Firma;Satz;Beschreibung;Datum;Von;Bis;Pausen\r\nCMXACT;1 Testprojekt;1 Sebastian Wehrmann;1 gocept apitest;1 Testprodukt;allgemeine T\xe4tigkeit;20120120;08:07;14:28;1:12\r\n'

Projects: get_projects

Projects can be exported with the get_projects API. It returns an entry for every project set (Projektsatz) of each project (Projekt):

>>> proj = collmex.get_projects()
>>> len(proj)
2
>>> proj[0]['Projektnummer'] == proj[1]['Projektnummer']
True

>>> proj[0]['Satz']
u'5,00'
>>> proj[1]['Satz']
u'9,65'

Caching

Results queried from Collmex are cached for the duration of the transaction.

To demonstrate this, we instrument the _post() method that performs the actual HTTP communication to show when it is called:

>>> original_post = collmex._post
>>> def tracing_post(self, *args, **kw):
...     print 'cache miss'
...     return original_post(*args, **kw)
>>> collmex._post = tracing_post.__get__(collmex, type(collmex))

The first time in an transaction is retrieved from Collmex, of course:

>>> transaction.abort()
>>> collmex.get_products()[0]['Bezeichnung']
cache miss
u'Testprodukt'

But after that, values are cached:

>>> collmex.get_products()[0]['Bezeichnung']
u'Testprodukt'

When the transaction ends, the cache is invalidated:

>>> transaction.commit()
>>> collmex.get_products()[0]['Bezeichnung']
cache miss
u'Testprodukt'
>>> collmex.get_products()[0]['Bezeichnung']
u'Testprodukt'

Remove tracing instrumentation:

>>> collmex._post = original_post

[1]

First we need to clean up the Collmex environment:

>>> import gocept.collmex.testing
>>> gocept.collmex.testing.cleanup_collmex()

[2]

Invalid login information raises an exception:

>>> collmex_invalid = gocept.collmex.collmex.Collmex(
...     os.environ['collmex_customer'], os.environ['collmex_company'],
...     os.environ['collmex_username'], 'invalid')
>>> collmex_invalid.get_invoices(customer_id='10000')
Traceback (most recent call last):
    ...
APIError: ('101004', 'Benutzer oder Kennwort nicht korrekt')

Changes

0.8 (2012-01-20)

• Added API for retrieving activities (get_activities).

• Updated tests and test infrastructure to recent changes in Collmex.

0.7 (2009-11-05)

• Added API for retrieving projects and creation of activities.

0.6 (2009-02-16)

• Make models robust against API changes so they don’t immediately break when the record becomes longer.

• Updated customer model to current API.

0.5.1 (2009-01-08)

• Fixed multi-threading bug: thread-local data needs to be intialized for each thread.

0.5 (2008-12-19)

• Values returned from Collmex are converted to unicode.

• Cache results for the duration of the transaction.

0.4 (2008-12-11)

• Added get_products and create_product.

• Added create_customer.

• gocept.collmex.testing.cleanup_collmex() now only deletes any existing data, it does not add any sample customers or products, use the API for that.

0.3.1 (2008-12-02)

• Python 2.5 compatibility.

0.3 (2008-12-01)

• Using Windows-1252 as encoding when uploading data (used to be ISO-8859-1).

• Fixed transaction integration when upload fails.

0.2 (2008-11-28)

• Modifications for changed Collmex API.

• Added get_customers to query customers (API CUSTOMER_GET).

0.1 (2008-10-14)

• first release. Supports getting and storing invoices.