Dev-Picayune

As the new Livelink administrator for our company, I found myself in a situation where I was supposed to add 120+ new users to the system. The problem with that is that it is entirely web-based and generally no fun to manually enter things into. After setting up about 5 users, I decided that I needed to see what I could do with Python. I knew that Livelink used session-based cookies, so I needed something that would handle that for me. First I found Puffin, and I felt overwhelmed. It seemed like it did too much and it would take too long to learn it… plus I didn’t know if I would be able to easily get the users into the xml config files.

Then I found PycURL and it was just what I needed. I was able to write about a 75+ line program that would read a comma delimited file of users and config options and added them using the Livelink web forms. I probably spent a few extra hours than if I had just done it manually, but now I have a cool utility for doing batch user creation as well as knowledge to leverage when needing other mass update utilities. And the code looks so cool. I even used a little list comprehension here and there. It was good to use Python again and get something cool done.