ticket-tailor-import-sales

Simple command line import scripts for Ticket Tailor sales.

Uses Mechanize gem for HTTP communication.

Usage

Login details

The login details are stored in .config/login.yml which is ignored by Git and thus not included in this repo. The keys are username, password, eventid, which you should set to your username and password and the number Ticket Tailor uses to represent the event. An additional key sheet_key is the key or id of the Google Sheet to save exports to.

Importing tickets to Ticket Tailor

Create a CSV import file, with the following headings:

• name
• email
• city
• postcode
• transactionid for some unique identifier for each sale
• A quantity_[something] column for each ticket type you're importing. You can get the id of each ticket type by inspecting the site HTML.

Each subsequent row in the CSV contains details of one purchase to be imported, and can consist of any quantity of each of the defined ticket types. The mandatory fields are the same as on the Ticket Tailor website. Note that if you've got full address details as mandatory information for your event, or some other custom field, the import may fail. For the obvious reason that the information won't be provided.

After setting up the login details and the CSV, use ruby import.rb name-of-the-CSV-import-file to import the tickets into your event. If an import hits issues, they will usually be trapped and you'll be thrown into a REPL (a Ruby command line called from within the program's execution) to see what's going on. To retry an import that partially failed, remove the rows that have already been imported, fix any errors in the data, and use the new CSV as the import source. Each imported ticket will use the import date as the purchase date, which can complicate later sales analysis. There isn't a way to fix this at present, unfortunately.

Exporting tickets from Ticket Tailor to Google Sheets

Google Sheets is used as it can be accessed online on a regular basis. However, it does require setup of authentication:

• Follow these instructions on creating a Google project and setting up a service account
• Save the resulting JSON file as .config/google_config.json for the export script to access it
• Create a Google Sheet in your normal Google account and share it with the service account's address, which is in the JSON file you downloaded
• Store the key of the Google Sheet (i.e. the big string of letters and numbers between two forward slashes in the web address) as sheet_key in the login YAML file you used to store the Ticket Tailor login and event details

Once you've carried out the setup, run ruby export.rb and it'll export the current ticket list to the Google Sheet. If you set this project up on a web-connected computer and run it regularly, you'll have a regularly updated sales list as the first worksheet of a Google Sheet, that you can then use as a source for further sales analysis and other activities. Beware: this first worksheet will get written afresh every time you run the script!

Development notes

• Use Mechanize gem to log in to Ticket Tailor
• Read an import CSV file into memory
• Navigate to the chosen event
• Fill in and submit page 1 - purchase selection
• Fill in and submit page 2 - purchaser details
• Fill in and submit page 3 - transaction ID
• Test with dummy data, and add trapping of incorrect submissions
• Test with a large scale live import
• Log into Google Sheets and create / access a sheet
• Select the export options
• Export the CSV file download link to memory
• Add new sales to the Google Sheet
• Fix the export code to work with the new Ticket Tailor order management UI
• Chunk the Google Sheet upload into sections, to try and reduce memory usage and speed things up
• Create regular running code, or set a cron job to run the script