doc/book/devrepo/dataimport.rst
author Denis Laxalde <denis.laxalde@logilab.fr>
Tue, 22 Dec 2015 09:23:00 +0100
changeset 11144 fd8bf29ed00e
parent 10513 7bec01a59f92
child 11238 bb5fdf1eb8fb
permissions -rw-r--r--
[tox] Generate test environments for Python 2.7 and 3.4 Test commands for each environment are written down explicitly since I could not find a way to extract the "package" name (e.g. "hooks") from the environment name (e.g. "py34-hooks"). For Python 3.4 interpreter, only environments (subpackages) that do not depend on cubes for their tests are listed since those test dependency cubes are not yet installable with Python 3.x. etwist is also not included since the Python 3 port is not complete at the moment. From local testing, py34 tests pass for the following subpackages: - dataimport - entities - ext - hooks - wsgi

.. -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

.. _dataimport:

Dataimport
==========

*CubicWeb* is designed to manipulate huge of amount of data, and provides utilities to do so.

The main entry point is :mod:`cubicweb.dataimport.importer` which defines an
:class:`ExtEntitiesImporter` class responsible for importing data from an external source in the
form :class:`ExtEntity` objects. An :class:`ExtEntity` is a transitional representation of an
entity to be imported in the CubicWeb instance; building this representation is usually
domain-specific -- e.g. dependent of the kind of data source (RDF, CSV, etc.) -- and is thus the
responsibility of the end-user.

Along with the importer, a *store* must be selected, which is responsible for insertion of data into
the database. There exists different kind of stores_, allowing to insert data within different
levels of the *CubicWeb* API and with different speed/security tradeoffs. Those keeping all the
*CubicWeb* hooks and security will be slower but the possible errors in insertion (bad data types,
integrity error, ...) will be handled.


Example
-------

Consider the following schema snippet.

.. code-block:: python

    class Person(EntityType):
        name = String(required=True)

    class knows(RelationDefinition):
        subject = 'Person'
        object = 'Person'

along with some data in a ``people.csv`` file::

    # uri,name,knows
    http://www.example.org/alice,Alice,
    http://www.example.org/bob,Bob,http://www.example.org/alice

The following code (using a shell context) defines a function `extentities_from_csv` to read
`Person` external entities coming from a CSV file and calls the :class:`ExtEntitiesImporter` to
insert corresponding entities and relations into the CubicWeb instance.

.. code-block:: python

    from cubicweb.dataimport import ucsvreader, RQLObjectStore
    from cubicweb.dataimport.importer import ExtEntity, ExtEntitiesImporter

    def extentities_from_csv(fpath):
        """Yield Person ExtEntities read from `fpath` CSV file."""
        with open(fpath) as f:
            for uri, name, knows in ucsvreader(f, skipfirst=True, skip_empty=False):
                yield ExtEntity('Personne', uri,
                                {'nom': set([name]), 'connait': set([knows])})

    extenties = extentities_from_csv('people.csv')
    store = RQLObjectStore(cnx)
    importer = ExtEntitiesImporter(schema, store)
    importer.import_entities(extenties)
    commit()
    rset = cnx.execute('String N WHERE X nom N, X connait Y, Y nom "Alice"')
    assert rset[0][0] == u'Bob', rset

Importer API
------------

.. automodule:: cubicweb.dataimport.importer


Stores
~~~~~~

.. automodule:: cubicweb.dataimport.stores


SQLGenObjectStore
-----------------

This store relies on *COPY FROM*/execute many sql commands to directly push data using SQL commands
rather than using the whole *CubicWeb* API. For now, **it only works with PostgresSQL** as it requires
the *COPY FROM* command.