Influx is a simple tool for importing datasets into Fluidinfo.

Introduction

Uploading large amounts of data to Fluidinfo is relatively easy, but also mundane, and there is a lot of repetition of logic when scripts are hand-written for different datasets. Influx attempts to remove as much work as possible from the process by defining a common data format for representing datasets to be imported into Fluidinfo and providing a simple tool to upload that data.

Installation

Create a virtualenv and install the requirements:

virtualenv --no-site-packages env
. env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Data format

The data to be uploaded must be provided in the following JSON format:

{'objects': [{'about': <about-tag-value>,
              'values': {<tag-path>: <tag-value>, ...}},
             ...]
}

This data will be loaded into memory, so it's important to make sure the JSON data structure doesn't get too big. For very large datasets, it's best to split the data into multiple files. The following example contains two objects that represent the Anarchism and Autism pages in Wikipedia. Each object has an about tag and a single en.wikipedia.org/url tag value:

{"objects": [
    {"about": "anarchism",
     "values": {
         "en.wikipedia.org/url": "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism"}},
    {"about": "autism",
     "values": {
         "en.wikipedia.org/url": "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism"}}]
}

Uploading data

In the simplest case, a dataset is represented in a single file. You need to pass a username and password and specify the file:

bin/influx -u username -p password data.json

Infux will load the file, upload it to Fluidinfo and print status information as it goes. If you have many files you can pass them as arguments to Influx:

bin/influx -u username -p password data1.json data2.json data3.json

You can also specify a directory, in which case Influx will load and upload all files that end with .json:

bin/influx -u username -p password directory

You can mix and match directories and filenames, as you wish.

Using a different API endpoint

You can provide a custom API endpoint, to upload data to the sandbox, for example:

bin/influx -u username -p password -e http://endpoint data.json

Customizing the batch size

When Influx loads the data from the JSON files you specify it uploads them in batches. The default is a good choice for most datasets, but you might get better performance with a different value. You can specify the batch size on the command-line:

bin/influx -u username -p password -b 75 data.json

Debugging

When you need to debug an issue you can use -v to enable verbose mode which writes details out about requests as they happen:

bin/influx -u username -p password -v data.json