Hamster-xls

Overview

This is a small command line python script which creates a .xls (excel compatible) spreadsheet from the Project Hamster Time Tracking application. Because managers like spreadsheets :) It can extract data for a specified date range (defaulting to the last 30 days), and can filter the data based on simple search terms.

Synopsis

From the inbuilt help:

usage: hamster-xls [-h] [-e DATE] [-s DATE] [-o FILE] [-f FILTER]
                   [-g {day,month,year}] [-b {category,activity}] [--version]

Create a .xls spreadsheet from your hamster time tracking data, with the
ability to specify the date range to extract.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -e DATE, --end-date DATE
                        the date tracking data should end at, inclusive in the
                        format YYYY-MM-DD (defaults to today)
  -s DATE, --start-date DATE
                        the date tracking data should start from, inclusive in
                        the format YYYY-MM-DD (defaults to 30 days before the
                        end date)
  -o FILE, --output FILE
                        the .xls spreadsheet file to create (defaults to
                        `./hamster-timesheet.xls`)
  -f FILTER, --filter FILTER
                        limit the data based on search terms. Comma (",")
                        translates to boolean OR and space (" ") to boolean
                        AND.
  -g {day,month,year}, --group {day,month,year}
                        group the tasks by day, month or year
  -b {category,activity}, --group-by {category,activity}
                        choose the category to group by (defaults to
                        activity). Only useful in conjunction with `--group`
  --version             show program's version number and exit

Requirements

• Python > 2.5 < 3
• Hamster to be installed and running, as the application connects to the hamster service using D-Bus.
• The xlwt python module for generating the spreadsheets.