Re: [IUG] Installing Expect at a turnkey site

[Adam Brin <abrin at brynmawr dot edu>]

Nathan,
	We do this all the time and have about 5 scripts that run on 
daily/weekly/monthly basis.  They're written in the PERL version of Expect 
(expect.pm) and run on a separate box.  We've found that perl handles a few things 
like regexps and subroutines much better than the TCL variety.  The types of 
things we do with it:

- newbooks list
- email notification of purchases to requestors
- withdrawl and deletion notices
- automatic creation of lists and updates to those lists
- auto export of files MARC or TAB
- export of M>I>F>S (record numbers) to daily email

- adam

On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 04:46:33PM -0500, Landis, Nathan wrote:
> Yitzchak Schaeffer (or other relevant users!),
> 
> Thanks for your post. I have a question for you. For exporting information from Millennium, do you have this process automated/scheduled? Do you use Expect for this or Millennium Scheduler? What format do you output to for use with your scripts?
> 
> We do not have the Millennium Scheduler add on so I am looking at the possibility of using Expect to output review file contents to a text file on a regular basis, and then using ASP to read the file and create customizable new book lists for our website.
> I was wondering how you dealt with outputting information from your system.
> 
> Thanks for your time!
> 
> - Nathan Landis
> 
> 
> 
> Nathan Landis
> Library Information Systems Specialist
> Greenwood Library ~ Longwood University
> Redford and Race Street, Farmville, Virginia 23909
> Tel:  434.395.2438  fax:  434.395.2453
> 
> >Message: 1
> >Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2008 22:45:28 -0500
> >From: Yitzchak Schaffer <yitzchas at touro dot edu>
> >Subject: Re: [IUG] Installing Expect at a turnkey site
> >To: IUG INNOPAC List <innopac at innopacusers dot org>
> >Message-ID: <479D4FD8 dot 6060202 at touro dot edu>
> >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
> >
> >Greetings --
> >
> >After a failed attempt at writing a suite of AutoIt scripts for Millennium to perform a specific function, I was delighted at how smoothly Expect works with the INNOPAC.  In Millennium, there were frequent illogical burps in the Java GUI that broke the script, whereas I have found Expect with telnet/ssh to be quite consistent.  The nature of telnet/ssh lends itself much more to scripting than the Java GUI - indeed, there's no straightforward way to "expect" a certain response from the app.  See Harvey Hahn's articles at http://www.ahml.info/oml/AutoIt.html for the gory details of his workarounds.
> >
> >My two cents from somewhat limited experience: do whatever you can outside the system via exports and PHP/Perl scripts (no risk to the primary data and you always have a handle on what's going on), use Expect for editing records directly where you need to, and only use AutoIt/Millennium when there's some Mil functionality that you absolutely need to work with.
> >
> >Yitzchak Schaffer
> >Systems Librarian
> >Touro College Libraries
> >33 West 23rd Street
> >New York, NY 10010
> >Tel (212) 463-0400 x230
> >Fax (212) 627-3197
> >yitzchas at touro dot edu
> 
> 
> 
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