Sometimes, it’s nice to be able to open a console or mockup a little script to do some work on the data that lies on the server.

Some real life examples include:

1. moving a bunch of objects around
2. renaming due to new naming conventions
3. delete many elements
4. import content from another source (CSV, database, etc)

To make such operations fun, we have created the Zena::Remote library.

Zena::Remote

You can get all the details here, but a small IRB session should give you the gist of it:

$ irb
>> require 'zena/remote'
=> true
>> remote = Zena::Remote.connect("example.com", "super secret token")
=> ...
>> c = remote['Contact'].new(:title => 'Zumbi', :parent_id=>1)
=> ...
>> c.save
=> {"fullpath"=>"Zumbi", "position"=>0.0, "klass"=>"Contact", "name"=>"Zumbi", "created_at"=>Mon Aug 30 19:37:10 UTC 2010, "title"=>"Zumbi", "updated_at"=>Mon Aug 30 19:37:10 UTC 2010, "event_at"=>nil, "log_at"=>nil, "v_status"=>50, "id"=>393, "parent_id"=>"1", "node_name"=>"Zumbi", "ref_lang"=>"fr", "kpath"=>"NRCC"}
>> remote.all("contacts")
=> [...]
>> remote.delete("contacts where title = 'Zumbi'")
=> [...]

This XML based API is very powerful (you can mass-delete, mass-update, use relations as methods, change links, etc).

Have fun !