Secret Santa

There is a LOT of garbage in this code. Notes to myself, print statements to debug, etc.  But this is the current incarnation of the secret santa code I'm using.  The old XML/Outlook version in C sharp was better, but I ran into email issues with Office moving online and switching employers and ending up on a Mac. Now I just generate .txt files.

2022 updates should include getting rid of the separate checks for exclusions and telling it to check for anyone in the full exclusion list so I can make it ragged.

Here....target == who[1] or target == who[2] or target == who[0]

And there's a lot of unnecessary iterative garbage to make sure it can brute force it's way to a list when it gets toward the end where it might dead end itself.  But to be honest, that doesn't take 100 iterations, it's over in like four. Anyway...I think I can boil this down to a dozen lines of code, so maybe I'll do that next year. Personally, I'm just glad I was able to find it again after moving machines twice in 2.5 years.

#0 fix the code >>

#0a put the guts of the retry in a function that can error out with an error message

#0b and let the error message run a global retry

#  load >> run >> each person >> one person fails >> clear and run

#1 import from a settings file (don't need a UI although the last one had one)

#2 which means we need to write to a settings file

#   name, spouse, last year (use the format year(last)file.txt as the default

#   use JSON instead of XML this time), ah....need an email address!

#3 put it in a bucket (file) in S3, put the code in a python lambda

#4 autoemail - lambda send email with ses: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/lambda-send-email-ses/

 

 

#2020 list...this needs to generate from input/output

#e.g. that last value should be a read from last year's file

listWho = [("Scott","Jen","Jackie")]

listWho = listWho + [("Eryn","Scott","Jen")]

listWho = listWho + [("Oliver","Jackie","Andrew")]

listWho = listWho + [("Jen","Scott","Ceri")]

listWho = listWho + [("Andrew","Jackie","Jen")]

listWho = listWho + [("Jackie","Andrew","John")]

listWho = listWho + [("Allison","Ceri","Andrew")]

listWho = listWho + [("Ceri","Allison","Ellen")]

listWho = listWho + [("John","Ellen","Scott")]

listWho = listWho + [("Ellen","John","Allison")]

 

 

 

def LoopLoop(listWho):

    targetExclusion = []

   

    for who in listWho:

        #print (len(listWho))

        #print(who)

        print(" ")

        print(" ")

        print("Owner: " + who[0])

        myRand = random.randint(0,len(listWho)-1)

        #print("random: " + str(myRand))

        target = listWho[myRand][1]

        #print("target: " + target)

        myIter = 0

        #could put all this in a function and call for success or failure

        #eg while false...

        #target can't be used already

 

        while target == who[1] or target == who[2] or target == who[0] or target in targetExclusion:

            target = listWho[random.randint(0,len(listWho)-1)][0] #I think it was my [1] here that was the mess, never returned somne folks

            print("temp target: " + target)

           

            myIter = myIter + 1

            #print(myIter)

            if myIter >=100:

                print("I FAILED")

                return False;

                #break #kill it and we will start over

 

        targetExclusion = targetExclusion + [target]

        print(targetExclusion)

        print("target: " + target)

        f= open(str(datetime.now().year) + "_" + who[0] + ".txt","w+")

        f.write("YOUR SECRET SANTA RECIPIENT IS: " + target)

        f.close()

        #do it again

        #actually, turn this into the loop

    return True; #ah, this is where I"m failing, I have to get to len to return true

 

 

print(listWho)

mybool = False

print(mybool)

while mybool == False:

    print(mybool)

    mybool = LoopLoop(listWho)

 

print ("Mybool = ")

print (mybool)

print ("end of script")