Overview

Rattail offers a framework which may be used for (presumably) all data import and export tasks, regardless of which systems are involved, or direction of data flow between them.

In other words it’s not just for getting data into and out of a Rattail DB, but e.g. might be used for exporting data from your POS to an online mailing list, etc.

See Concepts for more background on the framework.

The framework offers the following features:

• “dry run” mode to check things out before committing changes

• “warnings” mode which sends email with data diffs, e.g. when you expect no changes

• adjustable “batch size” for grouping changes when submitting to local (target) system

• full command line support for above, plus “max” changes to apply, show progress, etc.

• core code is optimized to run quickly, e.g. by fetching all data up-front

• new importers may be created simply / cleanly / according to existing patterns

• new importers may extend / replace core functionality as needed

See also the API docs for rattail.importing (and sub-modules).