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icon5.gif   Auto-Generate new logbook daily, posted by Ryan Blakeslee on Fri Apr 26 22:29:50 2013 
    icon2.gif   Re: Auto-Generate new logbook daily, posted by Stefan Ritt on Sat Apr 27 11:53:41 2013 
       icon2.gif   Re: Auto-Generate new logbook daily, posted by David Pilgram on Sat Apr 27 13:21:38 2013 
          icon2.gif   Re: Auto-Generate new logbook daily, posted by Stefan Ritt on Sat Apr 27 15:30:28 2013 
          icon2.gif   Re: Auto-Generate new logbook daily, posted by Andreas Luedeke on Mon Apr 29 10:17:54 2013 
             icon2.gif   Re: Auto-Generate new logbook daily, posted by Ryan Blakeslee on Tue May 7 04:57:37 2013 
                icon2.gif   Re: Auto-Generate new logbook daily, posted by David Pilgram on Tue May 7 11:54:23 2013 
                   icon2.gif   Re: Auto-Generate new logbook daily, posted by Andreas Luedeke on Mon May 13 22:31:37 2013 
Message ID: 67485     Entry time: Sat Apr 27 13:21:38 2013     In reply to: 67484     Reply to this: 67487   67488
Icon: Reply  Author: David Pilgram  Author Email: David.Pilgram@epost.org.uk 
Category: Question  OS: Linux  ELOG Version: 2.5.2 
Subject: Re: Auto-Generate new logbook daily 

Stefan Ritt wrote:

Ryan Blakeslee wrote:

Hello,

I am currently using ELOG as a daily logbook for work performed for customers.  This is a critical tool and process for 1. Showing customers work history 2. having a searchable knowledge base for future reference.  

Currently, I will create a new log entry, assign the customer using a custom ROPTION in my elog.conf.  This process all works fine, mostly, except I run into the following obstacles (that are all human related.)

1. Many days, there are no log entries to be created for a PARTICULAR customer, and other days there are no long entries to be created for ANY customer.

2. Many days when there is a log entry to be created, it's created by me much later then when the work was performed.  For example, I do a bunch of work Tuesday and Wednesday, but I don't have time to enter all my entries until Thursday.  

2A. In this case, I have to manually go back and edit the log entries with text-editor to adjust the times, dates, and such.

2B. In this case, I have log files with a file-name of THURSDAY (042513a.log) for work entries done on Tues and Wed, so I have to go back and rename the log files for consistency sake (mv 042513a.log 042313a.log).  ** I know this is not a requirement of the program, but I like to have the log filenames consistent with the dates contained in them.

 

All these I admit are human error -- but as a small business owner, I just can't always get to the log entries every day.

 

To overcome this, the manual solution would: at the beginning of each day, create a new log entry -- regardless of work to be performed and updated later.  This would serve as sort of a place holder.

However, I can't commit myself to always create a log entry for every day either.  Again, human error.

 

Is what I would like to be able to do is create a new log entry, every single day, automatically.  I would then have a growing log dir of daily log entries (files) for ever day of the week, most blank but some would then contain data that I enter later-- either at the end-of-day or on a day I have downtime and can commit to administrative work.

My thought is I could probably schedule a cron job do to this, but i'm not completely sure how I would go about auto-populating the incremental ID's, dates, etc.  Second, I don't know if there is a way to do this within ELOG itself, or if there is a built-in mechanism that already covers this.

 

Has anyone run into this, or solved this problem, or can someone kindly point me in the right direction or how I can implement the daily auto creation of logs?

 

Thank you very much in advance!

Actually I would not worry with the 042313a.log files. In a future version of elog they might be replaced by a database or so. I see two options:

  1. Add an attribute of date/time type. You do that with "Type <attribute> = datetime". Then you can assign a certain date or time to each entry you do. That means you can tag an entry with the date of yesterday or so. If you make that date then the main database key (via "List display") it basically replaces your "internal" date.
  2. You can do automatic entries with the "elog" utility coming with the distribution and described here. This you can even run from a cron job. If you submit a new entry from elog, you get automatically the incremented IDs etc. You can use some default values for the attributes, which you can change later.

 Purists look away now.

I have the same issues regarding "catching up" of entries.  So what I do is use the date command to reset the computer's time back to the time that the entry [i]should[/i] have been made.  Say I need to put an entry for last Thursday (today is Saturday 27th),

Firstly I set the clock back by

date 04252200

(I use a time of 22:00 or later as code for a retro-made entry, the date being the important point for me).

Then any entry will have the correct time (sic) and date entry within the file, and the file the expected format of 130425a.log

After Thursday's batch of entries, I then simply reset the clock for the next entry/ies or indeed back to real time.

Mind you, my log files have the format yymmdda.log, whereas you state yours are mmddyya.log, which strikes me as a very high degree of flexibility!

 

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Nice to meet someone else who gets down to the bare ascii and knows how to edit the xxxxxxa.log files!

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