Last modified on $Date$ If you want to reuse PyKota datas from another software, but don't want to modify your existing application to have it connect to PyKota's database, your best option is the new dumpykota command. dumpykota can export PyKota datas in a number of formats. The supported output formats are comma separated values, semicolon separated values, tab separated values, and XML. For the print job history's datas, a special format identical to CUPS' page_log format is also supported. This allows you to interface PyKota with third party tools like phpPrintAnalyzer which is a logfile analyzer for CUPS, even in the case where you use LPRng instead of CUPS. More formats may be added in the future. In particular, SQL and LDIF are planned, but are currently not implemented. dumpykota can't dump all datas at once though, you have to specify which type of datas you want. The possible types are : Users Users groups Printers Printers groups membership Users groups membership Users print quota entries Users groups print quota entries History of payments History of print jobs You can then import the dumped datas into a spreadsheet for example, if you want to create complex reports with nice looking graphs and the like. An important feature of this command is the possibility to use a simple but powerful filtering mechanism to only export the datas you want. You can pass any number of filter expressions which will be ANDed together to select only certain records in the database. For example the filter expression username=jerome would only dump datas pertaining to user jerome while the filter expression start=2005 used when dumping the history would only dump jobs printed during the year 2005. Several keys like username are possible, but some only apply to certain data types. Using a key which is not supported for a particular data type may return an incorrect result. Please refer to dumpykota's help or manual page to obtain the complete list of supported keys. This command could also be used if you plan to write your own management tools : just write wrappers around the pkprinters, edpykota, and dumpykota tools, and your own tools will automatically benefit from PyKota database backend independance layer. This is exactly what the third party software phpPykotaAdmin does. Finally, dumpykota's functionnality is now also available remotely through the use of the dumpykota.cgi CGI script. Only PyKota administrators can dump PyKota's datas. dumpykota -v--version -h--help -f outputformat --format outputformat -o filename --output filename -d datatype --data datatype