Automatic encoding rooms

1

Hi indico users and admins,

Starting the installation of indico from the beginning for my institution, I would like to know if there is an automatic method to add buildings and rooms from a csv file. Let’s say we have ~100 rooms, I would like to avoid using the IU and the mouse.
Should I use indico shell, fill the PostgreSQL DB directly …
Do you have a suggestion?

Thanks

Juan

2

you could use the same API used by the UI if it’s a one-time thing. just copy the session and csrf tokens from the browser and send the http requests using a library like requests in python.

or you could use indico shell to create Room instances and add them to the correct Location. that’s a good choice if it’s not a one-time thing since you can re-run the script. FWIW, at CERN we use a custom plugin to sync rooms regularly; if you have some central database you could adapt our plugin for it.

3

Thanks!

It is one-time thing so I will see how to use the API but I will keep in mind the plugin.

4

the easiest way to find out what to send is creating one room manually and using your browser’s devtools to see what data is sent when saving it

5

I used the browser’s devtools and see that this data was sent:

{“owner”:“User:1”, “capacity”:20, “verbose_name”:“salle4”, “building”:“Chim”, "floor ":“2”, “number”:“24”, “location_id”:2}

the URL for the POST was /rooms/api/admin/rooms/.

Based on the exmple at
https://docs.getindico.io/en/latest/http_api/exporters/room_booking/#booking-a-room

curl --data “username=jdoe&from=2012-12-30T21:30&to=2012-12-30T22:15&reason=meeting&location=CERN&roomid=189” ‘http://indico.server/indico/api/roomBooking/bookRoom.json’

I try:

curl --insecure --data “owner=“User:1”&capacity=20&verbose_name=salle3&building=Eco&floor=2&number=25&location_id=2” ‘https://indico-server/rooms/api/admin/rooms/’

and I get :
…

Bad Request

It looks like there was a problem with your current session. Please use your browser's back button, reload the page and try again.

...

I think this is because an authentication is needed but, I do not see were to set the connection token ak=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

6

You need to send a JSON payload - currently you are sending form-encoded data. The easiest way to do so is using the httpie tool (pip install httpie):

http -j post https://indico-server/rooms/api/admin/rooms/ 'Cookie:indico_session=XXX' 'X-CSRF-Token:YYY' 'owner=User:1' 'capacity:=20' 'verbose_name=salle4' 'building=Chim' 'floor=2' 'number=24' 'location_id:=2'

The CSRF token can be found in a <meta ...> tag when viewing any Indico page. You also need to send the indico_session cookie. Use you browser’s developer tools to check the cookies. Note that you cannot use an API key here.

7

Yes !! this works.
Thanks a lot and Merry Christmas