Sync projectplace workspace documents

This is a tool intended for IT-personnel in an organisation using Projectplace.

It downloads all documents in the main document archive in all workspaces in a Projectplace Enterprise Account, and on subsequent runs downloads only new or modified files.

It also renders a HTML-page structure providing the opportunity to navigate the workspaces, folders and documents.

It is suitable to set up as a recurring task, for example nightly.

Currently only handles documents uploaded to the document tool in Projectplace workspaces, documents uploaded to other artifacts (e.g cards, activities, conversations etc) are not downloaded or represented through this tool.

The first run of the tool will necessarily be much slower than all subsequent runs, once everything has been synched once, only new or updated info is fetched.

"Poor man's" backup

When workspaces are archived or terminated in Projectplace - this script will retain data from those workspaces indefinitely (unless explicitly deleted). The same goes for documents that are deleted from workspaces in Projectplace. If they have been downloaded by this script once, the local database will retain those document.

Basically, the local version of the workspaces will behave as if nothing is ever deleted from document archives.

If documents are moved, or renamed - that will be reflected however. But as soon as they are deleted they will remain as they were when they were deleted.

Set up

1. Config

First of all you need to request a "robot" from Projectplace. This is only applicable for Projectplace enterprise accounts. Then enter the information you received from projectplace in config.json as follows:

{
    "consumer_key": "ENTER YOUR APPLICATION KEY",
    "consumer_secret": "ENTER YOUR APPLCIATION SECRET",
    "access_token": "ENTER YOUR TOKEN KEY",
    "access_token_secret": "ENTER YOUR TOKEN SECRET",
    "host": "https://api.projectplace.com"
}

2. Other config settings

The following configuration options are optional

2.1 Limit to specific workspaces (optional)

If you want to limit the synchronisation to certain specific workspaces, specify an array of workspace_ids such as:

{
    ...
    "host": "https://api.projectplace.com",
    "workspace_ids": [3281238,3212309]
}

2.2. Configure where files should be stored (optional)

If you want to pick another location than localdata for the storage of html files and the downloaded files from the workspace. Specify a filestorage attribute in your config.json-file. Such as:

{
    ...
    "host": "https://api.projectplace.com",
    "workspace_ids": [3281238,3212309],
    "filestorage": "/absolute/path/to/a/directory/"
}

Note: If you change the filestorage option AFTER you have downloaded files from Projectplace - the local database will think that you have already downloaded them, and will not download them again (unless they change in Projectplace). Solution: move everything from the old location to the new location.

3. Python environment

This script is written assuming python3 - make sure you have python3 available on your computer.

1. Start by cloning the repo
2. In the resulting directory type virtualenv VIRTUAL -p python3
3. Then type source VIRTUAL/bin/activate to enter the virtual environment
4. Run pip install -r requirements.txt to install necessary packages.

Running

1. Run sync

python run.py -s

This will take a long time for the first run, as it populates a local sqlite database with all the relevant information and also downloads each document in turn.

The sqlite database is saved in the local file .data.

2. Download pending files

Running the sync (see step 1) sets up a local datastructure, but it doesn't actually download any files. To accomplish this run:

python run.py -d

All documents marked as in need of download during the synch-step are now downloaded in turn.

Each document is saved in directory localdata sorted under workspace IDs. The file name from Projectplace will not be maintained. For example "Resume.docx" will be visible as a unique ID, followed by the file ending - such as 27182376327.docx.

3. Render html

python run.py -m

This should be relatively fast as it uses the local sqlite database to generate html-pages which can be used to navigate Workspaces, Folders and to view documents.

Once run, simply double click localdata/html/index.html to navigate the workspace documents.

4. Do it all in one fell swoop

You can run all steps above by specifying

python run.py -s -d -m

This will synchronize the database, download files and render new HTML-pages.

Danger Zone

Delete data

• If you want to rerun the synchronization from the beginning, supply the -c flag. Please note that you may permanently loose data if you do so.

A note on information security

Since this code makes it possible to download all documents and some of their meta-data from all workspaces in an account - make sure to:

• Store to an encrypted storage medium
• Keep the configuration secrets secret
• Allow access to the files only to highly privileged stakeholders
• Access rights as they were defined in Projectplace are no longer relevant once the files are downloaded, anyone with access to the downloaded files will be able to see everything.