PyPPMS

PUMAPI - Python Interface

Stratocore's PPMS booking system offers an API (the so-called PUMAPI, short for PPMS Utility Management API) for fetching information from the booking system as well as changing its state and properties.

This is a Python 3 package for talking to the PUMAPI.

Usage Example

Fetch email addresses of all active users:

from pyppms import ppms
from credentials_ppms import PPMS_URL, PPMS_API_KEY

conn = ppms.PpmsConnection(PPMS_URL, PPMS_API_KEY)

print("Querying PPMS for emails of active users, can take minutes...")
emails = ppms.get_users_emails(active=True)
print(f"Got {len(emails)} email addresses from PPMS:")
print("\n".join(emails))

Testing

Automated testing is described in the TESTING document on github.

Note

The PPMS API sometimes exposes a bit of a surprising behavior. During development of the package, we came across several issues (this list is certainly incomplete):

• HTTP status return code is always 200, even on failed authentication.
• Results of queries are a mixture of CSV (with headers) and and text with newlines (with no headers and therefore without structural information on the data). JSON is implemented in some cases only.
• The CSV headers sometimes do contain spaces between the colons, sometimes they don't.
• Some fields are quoted in the CSV output, some are not. Difficult to separate the values since there are colons in the values too.
• Semantics of keys is not consistent. Sometimes user is the user id, sometimes it refers to the user's full name.
• Using an invalid permission level (e.g. Z) with the setright action is silently ignored by PUMAPI, the response is still done even though this doesn't make any sense.
• There is no (obvious) robust way to derive the user id from the user's full name that is returned e.g. by getrunningsheet, making it very hard to cross-reference it with data from getuser.
• The result of the getrunningsheet query in general is not suited very well for automated processing, it seems to be rather tailored for humans and subject to (mis-) interpretation.
• Unfortunately Username and Systemname are not the unique id, they are rather the full description. Therefore sometimes looping over all users and systems is necessary.
• Some results have a very strange format - for example, the starting time of the next booking is given as minutes from now instead of an absolute time.
• Official documentation is rather rudimentary, i.e. it contains almost no information on what is returned in case wrong / invalid parameters are supplied and similar situations.

References

• Imagopole PPMS Java client