Request: UIEE export

[Joshua McGee]

One of the more frustrating losses when I ditched my last Windows box was
the ability to run a  program called HomeBase (
http://www.abebooks.com/docs/homebase/).  HomeBase is designed for online
booksellers.  The user can scan a bar code and have scraped information
automatically populated into database fields (sound familiar?)  Then one can
export it to various formats, including the crucial UIEE, which is what I
use.

This may be beyond your intended scope, but Tellico is almost there.  It
just needs a few custom fields (which can of course be added by the end
user) and, crucially, an exporter to UIEE format.

I could write and test such an exporter in about an hour if Tellico were
written in Perl, but I don't speak python (that's what it's written in,
right?)  I'm not oppposed to writing it myself, but there would be a
learning curve as I learned the new language.  At present, I have a Perl
script written that converts from one of Tellico's output formats (I forget
which one I chose) to UIEE as an external utility.  But a native exporter
would be great.  The ability to ftp changed entries to a server and delete
or archive entries based on a downloaded file of purchased books (in the
same UIEE format) would be stellar.  The ability to scrape one or more used
book aggregators to find a range of asking prices for that ISBN and populate
one's "Asking Price" field with the low, high, median, or mean values from
that scrape would be, er, more than stellar (galactic?)

For the former, as somewhat of a hack, you could pre-associate named fields
with output fields (stuff like "purchaseprice" and "askingprice"), as
happened when I provided the LoC sort code, and just require the user to
follow that naming convention.

HomeBase does start up in wine, but cannot do anything very useful: you can,
however, see the fields required

(I will feel foolish if I've already asked this.)

- Joshua McGee
http://www.mcgees.org
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