Re: [IUG] Installing Expect at a turnkey site

["Landis, Nathan" <landisng at longwood dot edu>]

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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