It’s been a while since the last entry. Unfortunately, COVID-19 has somewhat destroyed any sense of continuity to my professional schedule. This has somewhat led to burn out and a severe lack of motivation to work on anything that wasn’t related to my job. But! All of these things eventually get better, and I’m finally out of lockdown and able to get back to a somewhat “normal” routine (as far as wearing masks and that has become the new normal).
In the meantime, I started working on a small project called PyNance. This project is a budget tracking app with an emphasis on complete automation. The goal is for the program to grab payslips on a fortnightly basis from a specified Gmail address and process the data. Once the required data has been extracted, it is all pushed to a companion Google Spreadsheet that outlines my current budget recommendations based on specified values.
The project started off pretty easy, with the creation of the PDF parser. This was for the most part pretty seamless, and just a case of scraping the PDF and indexing data based on known keywords within the payslips.
The harder bit came to push data to the spreadsheet. I remembered way back when working with the GSheets API, but couldn’t remember the flow of the API. As it turns out, it’s a relatively stock standard API with a token system. Once the session/token handler was completed, the sheet handler was written up. It uses the token, a specified spreadsheet ID (which I’ve had to make secret for privacy/security reasons on GitHub), and a GSheet scope. It is important to note that if the scopes change, a new token needs to be generated. This will become important later when I add Google scopes to enable PyNance to access Gmail.
The sheet is still relatively unpopulated, but the data transfer works. The next step of the process is to build the Gmail handler. This is proving harder than I thought, considering the docs are far more sparse (at least in regard to any python specific syntax/methods). I’m running into various unexpected key errors on the objects I’m receiving back from Gmail which is an issue. Looks like I’ve got some more reading to do. Another feature that is in the back of my mind that I’m not entirely sure how to solve is the scheduling of the program. I’ve tried a few 3rd party tools that already exist - including an AppScript applet that is attached to a Google Sheet. This allows for scheduled scraping of a Gmail Inbox and grab attachments. The only issue: It’s a paid service for any more than 5 emails at a time, which knowing my inbox will be a definite issue. A second tool developed by autiomate.io allows a user to create a “Bot” of sorts that uses a drag and drop system for customizable inputs and outputs. The catch? Once again limited API use and the complete lack of support for Gmail attachments. This was a bit of a blow, since after hours of searching there doesn’t seem to be a clear-cut solution to my automation problem. This is something I’ve put on the backbone for now and will come back to later.