[Gramps-users] Import data from online resource

[Age B. <age...@gm...>]

Hi,

There's a website that provides many scans of birth, marriage and death 
certificates. I'd like to retrieve those the people in my family tree in 
an automated way, at least as much automated as possible.
Instead of creating a separate cli script that has to extract data from 
the Gramps db externally, or a db export for that matter, I might as 
well create a Gramps plugin for it. It would allow me to access the 
required data to search with in an easy way and also allows me to extend 
the existing family tree with info directly.

I'm completely new to Gramps development, and Python for that matter, so 
I wonder if I could get some pointers and suggestions to get me up to speed.

The idea is to use data like names, locations and event dates from an 
existing family tree as search criteria on the website. For each event 
I'd start searching with as much info as possible to limit the amount of 
results. A selection dialog will be presented if I end up with more than 
one result. Less search criteria will be used when no results are returned.
Accepting a result will present you with a dialog that allows you to 
compare/confirm the result and specify what to do with the retrieved data.
Search results will give me a download link for the scanned certificate 
as well as names, dates and locations involved with the event.
The main goal is to download the scans and link it to the appropriate 
event. The other data can be used as confirmation for, correction of and 
contribution to existing data.
As a next step I could also add capabilities for searching for new data, 
instead of using existing data, and use the result for creating new 
people, locations and events. It beats manual input, if you ask me.

What do you think of the idea itself? Would it be a valuable addition to 
the Gramps plugin set or do you advice against it? If it is, I'll put 
more focus on creating the plugin as one for the general public to use 
instead of a more hack-ish one for personal use.

Is there already a plugin available that provides similar functionality 
for a different website that I could use as an example or even as a 
plugin base?
What about a good example plugin that has its own dialogs and/or does 
data insertion in existing family trees?

I'd need to scrape/parse the returned search query result web page. 
Gramps already has XML parsing capabilities for importing e.g. GEDCOM 
files but I couldn't find it in the source code as fast as I would like 
to. Where does this take place and which parser is being used? I'd need 
to stick to one that is available on all platforms and prevent 
additional requirements as much as possible.

I assume this plugin would fall into the category Tools, no?

Please let me know what you think.

Yours,

Age