Recently I did some programming to help a health website aggregate data about content on one of the sub-portals within its network. The goal of this work was to gather pieces of information spread across several spreadsheets.
The requirements for the end result of the work was a valid CSV to serve as input for an automated script.
I did not have direct access to the content databases from my scripts. So to accurately aggregate complete data sets, I wrote a series of ruby scripts to consume the incomplete content data which, spread across a number of a spreadsheets.
In addition, I used Ruby’s net/http library and hpricot to test the resulting data sets and ensure their accuracy.
