Made life easier

30.10.2008 12:20 ·  Notes  ·  work

Recently, I have often been asked to produce various reports using data from .in4 files (those who know will understand). The work has to be done for “yesterday”, while the number of files to be processed is counted in the hundreds and thousands.

I used to use GIS Geoproject 5.x to do this: import files and then use the “Semantic Registry” to create the table I needed. But the lack of a batch import of the exchange files in Geoproject makes the process a real torture: select a file, import it, transfer the information to the project, select the next file… At the same time, there is a risk of getting confused and processing the same file twice, or missing something. And there is a significant slowdown after the first hundred objects. It is uncomfortable, long, and monotonous.

Deciding to simplify and speed up this process, I started programming a few days ago. The first beta saw the light of day today and even worked as it should. The principle is simple: select files, extract the necessary information and write it into a text file with a delimiter. The resulting file opens perfectly in OOo Calc or MS Excel.

I did a small test: 2219 files (20 of them block files) were processed in about 7 seconds. Not bad.