Earlier this year I have posted an article on how I managed to gather and persist calories from FDDB.info. As I have grown more interested in macro-nutrients, I had a look into extending my application to gather more data. Unfortunately this resulted in a complete rewrite, as the approach I took in March relied on the CSV export from FDDB, which does not contain data about consumed sugars.
Looking into FDDB and their exports I soon realized I had parse the HTML of their website, because the needed data is only present on there and not contained in any structured exports. Making use of my knowledge about their site from my earlier exporting approach I started up IntelliJ and decided to create a second Micronaut application, after my first steps with it in the Datadog metrics project. The tool I have created can be found on my Github account:
This tool exports the following data on a daily basis: kcal, fat, carbs, sugar, protein, fiber. To achieve this Micronaut runs a scheduler which gathers the data for the day before at night. The retrieved data is then written to a Postgres database. To gather data of previous days, weeks and months I implemented a HTTP endpoint which can be called by appending /batch to the context route and sending a POST request containing the following JSON:
{
"fromDate": "2021-05-13",
"toDate": "2021-08-18"
}
The data is then persisted to the Postgres database for each day. Having all the data in Postgres present makes it quite easy to create some graphs to track the consumption of macro-nutrients. Grafana makes this quite easy:
For the prerequisites see my earlier post explaining how to obtain the necessary cookies for FDDB.info to allow HTTP requests to access your login.