regKPI: register a KPI value in a database or text file

Some days ago I wrote a post on a simple console program. One of the sub-routines in that program was a function called regKPI. We will now dwelve into this function a bit (see original post at A simple console program). If we have a system where we have several KPI's to record, the simplest way to deal with this is the ask the user for a KPI name. Then we know that the answer should be treated as a string. For this we use Python's raw input construct:

def regKPI():

KPIName = raw_input("What is the name of your KPI ?")

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This way the user does not have to enclose her answer in string delimiters to make the program understand we are talking about character strings. The next question can be "what is the value of your KPI?", and we can take this as a string too. If we are only expecting numbers, we can use just input, and the numeric form is taken directly, but then it has to converted to a string afterwards if it is going to be written into an ASCII file (my favorite "mini" database).

To see how to write the data to a text file, wee the blog post "Writing time data to file". That pretty much sums it up for now. Next time we will look at how we can get KPI data from the "database" and do some statistical analysis on them using Python tools! (Hm... this is getting away from the core concept here of making command line tools - we'll finish this console program thing and return to our true path afterwards! Promise!).