Very start of the project

https://github.com/Daniel-ltw/countdown-nz-deals-parser

This was how the project first started. A Java based website parser that would go through the website and retrieve that data that I require and print those out into a spreadsheet/file. I would then be required to grab the data from the file and compile them into the google spreadsheet (spreadsheet), matching every product with their prices. This can be a tedious task and would require hours of work to update the spreadsheet with the correct details.

Google spreadsheet has a script editor function which you could create a script that could help you do many things. I then started to work with the script editor to parse the file that I get out of my Java project and parse that to do the match up and have the script change the data on the spreadsheet accordingly. This would then save up hours of work and just require 20-30 minutes of my time.

The spreadsheet do have it's limitation over time. It has 15k products and when you do open the page and work with data filtered views, your browser might not be able to handle the amount of data it is presenting. As you can see, this github repository was last touch 3 years ago and after learning ruby-on-rails, I have decided that this could be done better with a web framework. A web framework would provide a website on top of the background data processing.

Here comes this project, a ruby on rails web application that attempts to take all the manual work away.