A short collection of scripts originally built to assist the Houston Mayor's Office of Trade and International Affairs.
Merge data into a common template to avoid manual content generation and save time. The motivating use case was merging data from a CSV file with an HTML template to avoid tedious data input via a CMS system (i.e. internal Drupal).
It is assumed that the CSV file has headers. Headers will be made available as method calls on the various row objects available to a template.
Because of the restrictions on punctuation and spaces in method names, the headers will be converted via the following process:
- Leading and trailing spaces are removed.
- Letters converted to lower case.
- All interior whitespace and punctuation compacted into a single underscore.
Examples:
- "First Name" will become
first_name - "E-mail" will become
e_mail - "E - mail" will also become
e_mail - "Email" will become
email - "City, State, Zipcode" will become
city_state_zipcode
The user is notified of the names of the headers found in a given CSV, after conversion. Beginning a header with punctuation or a number may cause an error.
The TemplateMergeSingle class will provide a template with a list variable containing all the CSV rows, and render the output to a single file.
Example usage:
template = 'test/test_single_template.html.erb'
data_source = 'test/test_single_data.csv'
merge = TemplateMergeSingle.new(template, data_source)
merge.render_to_file('test/test_single_output_flag.html')The TemplateMergeMultiple class will render the template multiple times, and produce a new output file each time. Specifically, one render per row in the CSV. The data in a given row is provided via a row variable to the template.
Unlike TemplateMergeSingle, the method render_to_file does not take a single file path as an argument, but instead requires a block, which must return a unique filename for each row. The block is given the row number and row data itself to allow flexibility in naming.
Examples:
template = 'test/test_multiple_template.html.erb'
data_source = 'test/test_multiple_data.csv'
merge = TemplateMergeMultiple.new(template, data_source)
# Naming output files with a prefix and the row number:
merge.render_to_file do |row, row_number|
"result_number_#{row_number}.html"
end
# Naming output files with some data from the row itself:
merge.render_to_file do |row, row_number|
"#{row.title}_contact_page.html"
end