AutoDocument - Open-Source Mail Merge Alternative

Tom Malkin — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 02:09:27 +0000

AutoDocument - Open-Source Mail Merge Alternative

Hi there, this post is introducing AutoDocument, a free and open-source document generating web app that connects spreadsheets, databases and user forms into documents such as Microsoft Word and PDFs. It's based on fantastic open sources libraries like python-docx-template and headless LibreOffice.

MailMerge is a pain because it:

Only converts from Excel to Word
Uses special field objects in the Word document
Requires a Microsoft Office License
Has limited templating options

AutoDocument is a free and easily installable web app that can setup reusable Workflows that convert data from a variety of sources including straight from databases and spreadsheets to several types of outputs, including Word and PDFs. It only uses text based fields such as {{ myfield }} instead of special objects. It can deal with logical blocks of text and loops to populate flexible templates including lists and tables.

Features

Create (optional) user forms to kick off a workflow and link to your users
Load and save data, templates and output from windows and linux network mounts, as well as S3 and SharePoint libraries.
Powerful templating based on jinja2 and python-docx-template with logic blocks (like if, while etc) as well as standard field substitution.
Chain sources together like forms, spreadsheets and SQL queries to create clever workflows

Easily installed by running the container: docker.io/tommalkin/autodocument:latest

Repo: https://github.com/TomMalkin/AutoDocument
Documentation: https://tommalkin.github.io/AutoDocument/
Landing Page: https://autodocument.app/
Container: https://hub.docker.com/r/tommalkin/autodocument

I'd appreciate it if you can try it out and give me some feedback!

SimQLe - very simple SQL in Python

Tom Malkin — Sun, 16 Jun 2019 12:21:25 +0000

SimQLe

Hi all,

I found when creating various Python projects at work that require connections to SQL Databases, it wasn't easy to tick all the following boxes:

Easy to read and write SQL integration in any project
Manage multiple database connections simultaneously (including multiple types of SQL databases)
Get robust SQL connections in quick scripts up and running ASAP
Store connection strings, drivers etc nicely and consistently in secret .env variables

But most importantly:

Make it dead easy to write integration tests with test database instances where the code of the project doesn't need to change! Plus doing so with best practice and where you can be 100% sure that across the board your project isn't touching production databases during tests.

SimQLe was created to fix all these issues. It is based on the amazing SQLAlchemy library. SimQLe intends to be perfect when:

You don't need an ORM, just SQL queries,
You want a dead simple way to manage databases, and
You want super easy, robust testing.

The Basics

Install it: $ pip install simqle

Create a .connections.yaml file anywhere that looks something like this:

connections:
  - name: my-sql-server-database
    driver: mssql+pyodbc:///?odbc_connect=
    connection: DRIVER={SQL Server};UID=<username>;PWD=<password>;SERVER=<my-server>
    url_escape: True


test-connections:
    # the names of the test-connections should mirror the connections above.
  - name: my-sql-server-database
    driver: mssql+pyodbc:///?odbc_connect=
    connection: DRIVER={SQL Server};UID=<username>;PWD=<password>;SERVER=<my-test-server>
    url_escape: True

Then write some python like this:

from simqle import recordset, load_connections

load_connections("./.connections.yaml")

sql = "SELECT name, age FROM people WHERE category = :category"
params = {"category": 5}
result = recordset(con_name="my-database", sql=sql, params=params)

Then, when you're writing the tests, simply flip the SIMQLE_TEST environment variable to True before running the tests and the whole project will now use the connections defined in test-connections instead. Note how the server in the test connection is different. Voila! Stress free tests, and the actual project is just as clean as ever.

Make sure .connections.yaml is in your .gitignore for secure connections when collaborating too.

There's more it can do - but the above demonstrates how simple it can be. It has named parameters, engine exposure if you want to use them for pandas' fantastic read_sql, 100% coverage and is fully tested with every major open source SQL Database. Check out the Repo for more.

Let me know if you have any ideas or questions! There's a few upgrades on the roadmap :)

Github Repo:

Harlekuin / SimQLe

The simplest way to use SQL in Python

SimQLe

The simple way to SQL

Perfect for no fuss SQL in your Python projects. Execute SQL and return simple record sets with named parameters. Manage several connections, and switch between production, development and testing modes.

Documentation can be found here

Installation

Repository

https://github.com/Harlekuin/SimQLe

Or choose your poison:

$ pip install simqle
$ poetry add simqle
$ pipenv install simqle

SimQLe reads from a connections file in yaml format. See the .connections.yaml file section for more details.

Usage

In Production

Get a result from the name of your connection, the SQL statement, and a dict of parameters:

from simqle import ConnectionManager
# Intialise your connections
cm = ConnectionManager(".connections.yaml")
# Write some simple SQL
sql = "SELECT name, age FROM people WHERE category = :category"
params = {"category": 5}
result = cm.recordset(con_name="my-database", sql=sql, params=

…

View on GitHub

DEV Community: Tom Malkin

AutoDocument - Open-Source Mail Merge Alternative