Extracted modules from the Posterous Blog Importer. A way to structure the code needed to connect to various APIs and conform the results to your liking. At it's core is a very simple module that tries to keep things sane when communicating with a multitude of platforms.

gem install io_tools

Include the Importer.

class PosterousImporter
  include IoTools::Importer      
end

The Importer gives you a way to structure your import code. Moving data from one API to another consists of two basic steps, Collecting and Conforming. The rest of the work usually ends up being specific to the API that you are dealing with. So look in the lib/server/importers directory for how to deal with more complicated APIs that require helper methods.

The collect method.

class PosterousImporter
  include IoTools::Importer
  
  collect :feed_items
  
  def feed_items
    [{:title => "Fancy Post", :body => "Is fancy."}]
  end
  
end

The collect method accepts a method name as a symbol or a block that will provide an Array of results from the API or feed. This method does not have to do all the work, all it needs to do is return an Array.

Hey wait, what format do the results have to be in?

It doesn't matter. This is where our friend the conform method comes in.

class PosterousImporter
  include IoTools::Importer
  
  collect :feed_items
  
  conform do |incoming, conformed|
    conformed.title         = incoming[:title]
    conformed.body          = incoming[:body]
    conformed
  end
  
  def feed_items
    [{:title => "Fancy Post", :body => "Is fancy."}]
  end
  
end

The conform method is called for every entry in the Array that is created by the collect method. This is where you turn crazy camelcase field names from weird APIs into nice clean attributes that suit your systems needs. conform is passed the incoming item from the Array produced by the collect method. Along with an empty Openstruct to hold whatever values your system needs. These in turn will populate the final conformed_collection.

• Fork the project.
• Make your feature addition or bug fix.
• Add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
• Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
• Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

Copyright (c) 2010 Posterous Inc. See LICENSE for details.