Elements API: User Profile Updater

This is a quick demo program which updates user records via the Elements API. There are two programs here: One uses only the API, the other uses both the API and Reporting DB. For simplicity, start with the API-only version first.

Requirements:

• This program expects a file named "creds.py" with all of your login info. See the file "creds_emplate.py" for the required formatting.
• External libraries:
  • http requests,
  • (Optional) ssh tunnel
  • (Reporting DB version only): pyodbc

Expected input

The expected input is a CSV file with columns including:

• user_proprietary_id
• overview
• research-interests
• teaching-summary

Usage / Arguments:

profile-updater-api-only.py [-h] [-i CSV_FILE] [-c CONNECTION] [-t]

options: -h, --help show this help message and exit

-i CSV_FILE, --input CSV_FILE REQUIRED. The CSV file to process.

-c CONNECTION, --connection CONNECTION REQUIRED. Specify ONLY 'qa' or 'production'

-t, --tunnel Optional. Include to run the connection through a tunnel.

General Flow

1. Validate args and load creds
2. Start SSH tunnel if needed.
3. Convert the CSV into a python list of dicts
4. Get the "User Record IDs":
   1. For each user, ping the API, and search the XML response with xpath to locate the user record ID.
   2. If any user doesn't have matching records, print a warning, and remove them from the list.
5. Create and add body XMLs each user dict:
   1. Specify which columns on the CSV are being updated
   2. use Element Tree to construct the body XML
6. Send the updates to the API:
   1. Send the body HTML in a PATCH request to the users' 'User Record ID'
   2. If we receive any non-200 resonses, print and continue.

The Reporting DB version works the same way, except step 4 is replaced by an SQL query to the Reporting DB, which retrieves all of the information in a single transaction.