--- title: Poll and alert for recent filings, regex, migrations, and heroku scheduler slug: poll-and-alert-for-recent-filings-regex-migrations-and-heroku-scheduler published_at: 2021-05-03 17:00:01 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:16 +0000 summary: description: A little bit of regex. This is a bit of a long episode that has some little tidbits like some basic regular expressions, migrations, and setting up heroku scheduler. #rails #rubyonrails tags: [] views: 238 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/poll-and-alert-for-recent-filings-regex-migrations-and-heroku-scheduler youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G7m6fx4MwI youtube_id: 1G7m6fx4MwI embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/1G7m6fx4MwI thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1G7m6fx4MwI/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Poll and alert for recent filings, regex, migrations, and heroku scheduler *Published: May 03, 2021* *Views: 238* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G7m6fx4MwI) [![Poll and alert for recent filings, regex, migrations, and heroku scheduler](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1G7m6fx4MwI/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G7m6fx4MwI) ## Description A little bit of regex. This is a bit of a long episode that has some little tidbits like some basic regular expressions, migrations, and setting up heroku scheduler. #rails #rubyonrails ## Transcript what's up welcome back everyone in this episode we're going to talk about how you can build a tool to pull an api endpoint on some periodic basis um we're building this tool for tracking form 4 filings that are happening on the sec and then alerting us when there's some sort of like interesting filing that we might want to take action on and so what we've done so far is we have back filled we are working on back filling existing filings and so we've got a tool that can run um run background jobs to fetch filings uh it's using rescue for our background queuing system um and you'll notice that we have this kind of like rescue web endpoint that we can check out and you'll see i just queued our big backfill job so it's going to go and pull down a bunch of filings for a previous quarter in a previous year and so we're continuing to sort of like backfill backfill filings that we don't know about yet but i in a previous episode we talked about this backfill filings job so i wanted to quickly cover what changes i made to that because i think those are it's like a kind of a fundamental thing to think about when you're building background job systems and then i wanted to work on our tool for polling for recent filings so we can see you know as soon as filings are being created that we can see those popping up so this is still going um what we had before was back fill in our backfill filings job is we would just iterate over all of the filings and then we would call we would create a new temporary filing and then we would just persist that to the database now this was tricky because or uh yeah so it was tricky because in some cases the index has maybe like yeah in this case like over 30 000 filings and in the process for persisting the filing to the database we were going out and fetching each of those so our background job was really long running so we're talking like hours right so the entire job to persist all the filings for a given index and again an index is just like a massive list of links that go or that of paths that tell you where filings exist and so in order for us to process an entire index it would take in like hours and hours and hours if any of those filings failed to persist or if there was any exceptions that happened while persisting any of those filings then the entire job would fail and all of the future filings would would not be persisted to the database and so what we want to do is in the case that you're trying to read in a bunch of data you want to like read in like if you need to do two actions that might require some async work so the first action being an async task to fetch this big index file and then the second being uh n plus one basically or n queries for each of the items in that index so we needed to go out as part of persisting this filing we would go out and make an http request to fetch down the data for each of those filings and so what we did instead is i refactored this into a second job called persist filing which is just for an individual filing so what happens now is when we run the backfill filings job for a given quarter and in a year we go through the index so we download that master index from the sec and then we kind of like munge the index to find the actual items that we care about and we create a link and then we just kick off a bunch of subtasks if if the filing that we're looking at from the index is a form four there's a bunch of other forms we don't care about 10ks and s1s and whatever we're just kind of like excluding those so if it's a form four then we want to schedule another background job for each of those form fours and then in persist filing what we do is we iterate or i'm sorry then we just we just call filingpersister.persist and so we create a new temporary instance of an sac filing and then we persist it and this filing persister class will actually like fetch the filing so let's see so right filing parser yeah so filing parser.new we pass in the temporary filing filing parser so when we call this content method right here so dot content so when we initialize the filing parser this is creating an http request that goes outbound so when we're going through the process of like reading in the data from um from the sec we like ingest that text file which is in sort of an xml format we parse the xml into a bunch of ruby structs and then we take those structs and we write them to the database into these form four objects with related uh with related company and insider so that's kind of where we're at right now with our backfill process i wanted to just talk through how we had to make that small modification so that it would go one by one and now you can see so after i enqueued the chat the task here for for backfilling filings it went up to 56k plus and as we refresh the page here you can see the jobs are going down like one by one and that's because we've scheduled 56 000 new background jobs for each of the individual filings for that given index and then if we come over to our live form fours here and we refresh the page we'll see that this is like the count of our form fours so we're at like 97 552. now technically what i could do is scale up our the rescue processes so that i have you know 20 workers or something that are all chewing through this and downloading uh filings but i've actually decided not to do that intentionally because i don't want to like ddos or like spam the sec's website in fact they say please keep your uh your request to under 10 per second i'm actually doing less than 10 per second but i really don't want to abuse the api i just want to like pull in all the data um that i care about for like recent years and so this is kind of how we set it up you can see this is these are the jobs that are running so the next job that we want to create though is a new job that will just pull for the recent filings so if we i think we have uh resent yeah so we actually have this recent filings job here and it too is going to farm off to this persist filing job thing um and i i we kind of like started this out um we started building the fetch recent filings job and then sort of like changed direction and went and did the backfill and so i came back here and just added in this persist filings job performed later um so this should this should work i think out of the gate and this takes in some count of recent filings to run now the difference is that when we fetch recent filings if we receive a new filing we want to probably do something about that potentially so what i want to do today is look at making like a very very primitive alert system that will look at the recent filings and if there was an interesting filing it will kick off the notification so in a previous episode we used noticed which is a gem for creating notifications uh created by chris oliver and so in this episode what we want to do is build on our notification system and our polling system so that we can run these these uh these tasks or like run this background job on like uh every few minutes basis and if there's a new form four that has some interesting data that we'll create like some build some filters for we want wanted to notify us about those uh about those form force so what i think makes most sense is to create a rake task so we've got um in a previous episode we talked about the process for making these rake tasks so we actually have sec four dot rake here and we have poll recent filings and it is passing in the count so this is all this is actually all looking really good so we can use this rake task to kick off this fetch recent filings job and we can pass in the count as an argument um so let's let's open up um heroku add-ons open scheduler and this is the tool that allows you to schedule rake tasks inside of heroku and it looks like we don't actually have this add-on yet so let's create the scheduler add-on so we're going to say heroku add-ons create scheduler scheduler and this will add the like heroku scheduler and now we can open that up all right scheduler is a free add-on for running jobs so we're going to create a new job and we're going to run it every 10 minutes and the job is going to be rake sec for and it's called pull recent filings and we're going to pass it a count so what i think makes most sense is probably 10 or let's do let's do 20. so the most the most filings i expect to be new in the course of 10 minutes is going to be 20 filings i don't think that many come in so let's just say poll recent filings will pull for 20 filings and this is going to be the hobby whatever so this should run every 10 minutes so we'll save that job and so now this should run every every 10 minutes the other thing i wanted to do is let's go to this fetch recent filings job and talk about cues so right like by default we usually cue things as default i actually have a priority okay so when you deploy to heroku and you're using this rescue schedulers you define the cues and oftentimes we'll say you know just star which says like take take tasks or take background jobs off of any queue of any priority and execute those when you pass star like this and this is what i use in most cases however because we have these really long running background jobs um that are executing and taking forever right uh let's see so if we look at these jobs right in the default queue we have persist filing job and we have that background task job because those are really really long running those are going to happen those are going to take a really long time to actually execute so i think what we might want to do is in this case create the poll so i think i think we do want it as a as default because we're not always going to be back filling once the backfilling is done then um we should only be doing the polling jobs which are going to be pretty quick so let's just keep the priority as is pull backfill pull fetch that's fetch reason filings job yeah so we're going to keep this cued as default we'll keep this one cued as default and that'll just run okay so the first time this executes the first time that this job executes the the poll the fetch recent filings job is going to be enqueued behind all of the default or like behind all of these persist filing jobs that are that are waiting to be backfilled so i i suspect this is actually going to take longer than 10 minutes um or yeah longer than 10 minutes so we might actually end up with several uh phil um fetch recent filings jobs queued which won't actually execute until after all of the background ones are are run and then we will fetch the recent filings several times and try to persist those filings so um yeah this is not not ideal but i think it's fine for now okay let's make another job which will notify on recent filings so we'll say rails g job notify recent filings okay notify recent filings job and this this jobs job uh will be responsible for iterating over recent filings that we have not like checked yet and if there's anything interesting about them then we will kick off a notification so what we want to do here is we want to sort of like iterate over form 4 so we're going to do something like form 4 dot where checked is false each do form and then we want to say like form dot is uh like interesting or something like that form dot should notify um and if it should notify then we're going to kick off our notification so we'll say form for notification so we're using this the noticed gem for this so we'll say notification.with form 4 is the form and then we'll say dot deliver later to some user in this case i'm just going to say user first and that's me but i think we would probably want yeah so this is going to be this is going to be interesting because we need the like first of all we need to go add the concept of whether or not the form has been checked and after the form is checked we're going to say like form dot checked or dot update checked to true and we'll we'll drive on and we'll just assume that we've sort of like marked it as checked so we have all these form fours in the database we're going to create a new migration that will add this boolean checked and when we perform this notify recent filings job we'll go look at all the forms that we haven't checked yet which should only be um recent filings actually yeah the other thing we could do is say um where the filing date is greater than yesterday so that uh we only were because we only really want to notify about stuff that's being filed today or being filed recently um so yeah i wonder if we want to like wait until this is backfilled until everything is backfilled um or we can update our persistence like i'm humming and hawing here because of a couple things like i'm just sort of i threw out this code but i haven't really like fully thought through exactly how this should work um and technically this should notify method doesn't exist right so form four doesn't have a should notify method that's where like the real juicy stuff happens like we're going to look at all the data about the form 4 and about the insider and the previous trades and the company and its market cap and what its current trading prices and things like that and if all of those things say that we should notify then we will notify but um so for instance like if we were to just start with some really naive should notify we might say something like should notify and we can say like you know is it a buy is the insider the ceo cfo or the like president and um is the number of shares changing the total holdings by more than five percent um so this is where the actual like strategy comes in about which forms we think are interesting or think might be interesting and so i think this we might actually want to create some sort of like settings that someone would um determine their sort of like threshold for when they want to be notified and so that that's going to get a little bit interesting right because someone might want to be notified only if it's a sale and only if it's a director of marketing or something like that right so um this is where it's going to get a little dicey uh so let's start basic let's just start really basic and say and we'll just we'll just use these three these three sort of markers so is it a buy so we can say like if let's see if some shares is greater than zero so is it a buy and is the insider's title do we have the title here yeah so the officer title officer title is um uh we'll just say leader which we'll def will define as like is it a ceo cfo or president um and so it turns out that when people create these filings the title that they actually use on the form is like not super consistent so i think i have like a tool maybe somewhere that does some parsing of the officer title but let's see rails see let's just take a look at some form fours actually let's uh um heroku run rails c so we're going to look at the database on heroku so we're looking at like more data right now i don't have very many filings locally because i i didn't want to like fetch all the data locally and then also on heroku um so let's see here so we want to take a look at those officer titles and think about how we're going to determine whether it's a ceo cfo or president and the reason why i'm going with those specific titles is that in the investment intelligence based on insider trading book that we talked about earlier investment intelligence from insider trading so this this white covered book is super good if you're if you're interested at all in digging into insider trading and such um or like form four filings then i would definitely recommend this book and in this book there's a lot of data that shows that these specific insiders or like type officers with these specific titles um tend to like have more gray area type information and like a better sense for how the business is going to go so let's see so form form four dot pluck officer title oops form four dot pluck officer title okay so tons of officer titles all right let's um yeah it's gonna pull down 50 000 titles or something ah stop okay um so form four dot where well yeah so dot pluck officer title dot um form4.order officer title dot pluck officer title dot unique okay uh dot length so there's 6 000 unique titles so like right vp of worldwide sales and marketing vp of wgo president newmar right like these are all vp of underwriting so the likelihood that a vp of underwriting is going to make a decision about the company like a buy decision about the stock in the company um and that decision being like a really solid signal that the company is going to increase in share value is less likely than if the title was ceo right and so uh what i think we want to do is pull out the officer title and let's just take a look here at what these look like okay yeah so sometimes right like so sometimes the title is going to just be like ceo and then other times it's going to say chief executive officer so chief financial officer right chief accounting officer senior vice president c remarks that's where it's like really complex about their role like what they actually do uh principal accounting officer etc etc prez dot president um okay so what i think we want to do is we want to take the officer title and we want to see if it has ceo cfo president chief chief stuff chief of things uh so form four okay so let's say the officer title um let's see how should we do this um yeah i think we could probably do like some sort of um regular expression here let's let's try this out so if we say like uh vp worldwide sales is the title and if we say that's like title and if we say title tilde equals for regex and if we say vp star then maybe i did this the wrong way okay zero vp dead star okay so okay so when you use this this style regular expression it's returning the index of the match i think so if we tried like um sales yeah okay so um let's grab a couple of these titles and go to rubular so rubler is a really handy tool for ruby regular expressions so we're going to put a couple of titles in here so let's do tube and wire and then like let's get a nun uh yeah here we go treasurer cfo cfo and clo and let's see co-ceo interesting um cob and ceo okay so then we want our real expression to be something like cfo ceo right and so if if it matches ceo or cfo then we we do want it to to hit and so that is that is like actually hitting so then i think we want also dot like prez dot so let's see what were those president um co-president md and [Music] uh evp and president of some specific thing so evp and president of like a i don't know like that's a little bit less like if it has evp then maybe they have like a little bit less information so maybe we just stick with ceo and cfo and um and then chief yeah so then we also need like chief executive officer so we need like yeah where is it this is gonna be up closer to the top yeah so chief executive officer and we want it to be uh case insensitive so we can say i so here we'll say chief executive okay so i think this is what we want something like this so plop that in there and then we'll say um and if this is not nil then sure it's a leader like this is probably close enough um and we want this to be case insensitive and again this is probably something that i would do write a little test for but whatever for now we can just keep keep flying by the seat of our pants so leader okay and so if it's a if it's a buy and it's a liter and some shares divided by or like let's say like percent change here and this is going to be like the sum shares over shares f let's see some oh some shares after uh some shares after and if that if like percent change is greater than .05 then we should notify so let's this is going to again like just taking a look at our methods that we wrote here so the by is looking at this same database the the leader is looking at the same database the percent shares is uh looking at the database so technically i think we could write like a really fancy query that that just leveraged postgres to find these form fours and give them to us because we're going to do this in a notifier we're going to be looking at individual forms and so it's fine if we're just using ruby directly but let's try let's try messing around with some some actual form force so if we say rail c form four dot first and i put it on the wrong side again i don't know why i think it should go on the other side and that probably needs a zero huh 0.05 okay so form four dot first dot should notify and it's false okay so um so uh f dot sum shares f dot officer title so this one this one failed because it was not positive so let's say form four dot where some where some shares is greater than zero dot first and then we'll say f dot should notify false okay so f dot sum shares is 951 f dot sum shares after is that so the percent change is zero because we did we didn't use like floating point division these are just integers so we can say dot f div for floating point division and then we'll reload and grab that same form and then f.percent change okay so it was a one percent change that wasn't enough let's just like edit this form this is a local form so f dot sum shares after uh i don't know let's just say that f dot sum shares was actually equal to like 20 30 k and then f dot save bang f dot should notify false so f dot percent change is okay so the percent change is enough f it's a buy f dot uh leader it's not a leader okay so f.officer title is blank great okay so in this case we don't actually know the title of the officer and it's possible that this insider in particular is not actually an officer at the company it's possible that this insider is a 10 percent beneficial owner of the company and so if you own more than 10 of a company when you make trades in that company you have to file that with the sec just to make this like fun let's set the officer's title to like chief financial officer and then say f dot leader and it's true so now f dot should notify is true okay so i think that's like a good enough like rough test um and what we can do now is in our notify recent filings job we're going to say right we need to go back okay so now we've got this should notify thing cool we've got our form for notification and we're just going to deliver it to me and our should notify is just going to work for my settings for now we need to go back and add this checked false situation so rails g migration add checked to form fours checked is boolean and we'll say default we're going to set the default value for this column to be false and then we're going to like in the same migration we're going to say form 4 dot update and we're going to set checked to true so this is a little trick where where we want to add a column to the database that by default is set to false but we want to mark all of the ones that are already in there as true so instead of setting the default to true and then like uh figuring out a way to like uncheck that or something for the new ones we can just set it all to false which is gonna mean that we haven't seen it yet then we're gonna check all or like mark all the ones that we are have backfilled as true and we'll run this migration rake db migrate and if everything succeeds then we will we'll just push this up so we're going to say like add checked to forms um all right so fetch no we're going to say notify recent filings job okay so now we have this concept of it being checked we have the concept of if we should notify or not and we we are going to notify this specific user okay and then we're going to update check to true great so now when i'm doing when i'm back filing i'm doing backfiling so back filings job when we're persisting a filing from an old year from a previous year maybe we're looking at 2018 maybe we're looking at 2017. i don't want to check or alert on those filings i only want to have those there as context so that we can improve that should notify method in the future so what i want to do is i'm going to change this persist filing job to accept another argument and i'm going to pass in true and it's a positional argument we should probably give these keyword arguments or something but persist filing job and this is going to be checked and i think our filing persister is also going to need that because where the form 4 is actually created yeah so where the form 4 is created if we um so add check is equal to checked um yeah so right and then we're going to say checked is at checked so when we're persisting filings if we received checked true then we're going to mark it as checked and if we didn't receive it then here we'll just default this to false because in our actually we'll we'll not default it we're gonna oh okay i'm torn because we have a bunch of jobs that are already running whatever let's just deploy and we'll break those those currently running jobs that's totally fine we can keep we can keep backfilling them that's actually like probably a little better so then everywhere that we're using the filing persister we need to pass in the filing and whether or not it's checked so and persist filing job so we've got checked coming in there and we got checked coming in here and let's see where we've got persist filing job so we're passing it there and now we're going to pass it here and here we're going to pass false because this is going to be the recent filings right and i think that might be the only place that we use this so filing her sister uh so just in case we uncomment that later okay so this should this should work i think when we deploy it it's going to break our current jobs that's totally fine so like add concept of check do filings okay i think it was deployed let's refresh this uh we're looking again at our jobs here and i think this failed queue is about to get really popular let's see or like highly populated so heroku logs t and oh here we go three 30 41 52 63 69 okay so like all of the jobs that are in the default queue that are no longer passing the correct arguments to persist filing job because they don't pass that check flag are now starting to fail we also want to run uh heroku run rake db migrate so that our our form data that's on heroku picks up that new checked flag and i have a feeling that our our our thing is going to just crash like the whole process is going to crash so what i think let's see yeah so let's see if we can just remove the entire queue this cannot be undone are you sure yes okay all right fail jobs clear all the failed jobs yes okay going back to our overview you probably don't want to do that in real life right like if you're not 100 confident that um you'll be able to like pretty quickly and easily read all those jobs the way that i've written is like item potent so it's totally fine if i rerun all the same jobs over and over and over um which is why i'm comfortable just running it like that the other thing too well so some one of the one of the changes that i made was that when i was looking at a company i have a button here so app right is the company that we're about to open uh after this migration runs okay so now we should be able to say heroku run rake db migrate and it should just add the column to the database with its default and it should return like immediately no memory errors it's just like a simple super simple task we shall see and done great now we can come over here and try running this actually hold on reload um maybe a thousand was too much let's try like i don't know one okay 10 100 wow that takes surprisingly long that's frustrating but uh it'll work okay so we are now at a point where we have background jobs that are being scheduled for recent filings these failed i'm guessing because we don't have checked yeah so there was no check so if we say retry for all of these retry failed jobs they should all run fine um so now we can clear the failed jobs and then we'll come back over here and all of them should have run just fine so now we should see like these new filings come in and we did and this is for a couple days ago so not super it wasn't yeah it was a couple days ago but yeah let's take a look um and then refresh the prices so we have to the reason that i added a button to refresh refetch prices is that i don't want to hammer the alpha vantage price api too much and instead i only really want to fetch the prices when i care about looking at them on a chart um and so yeah this was this was a sell anyway so it doesn't really matter um but okay so i think i think things are working okay we've got our um our poll going with heroku scheduler and we should be notifying on recent filings so i we don't have time to like sit around and wait for a filing to come in um although that would be fun uh so i'm just gonna let it rock and hopefully i get an email and uh yeah i will report back in a future episode so thanks a ton for watching and uh yeah we'll see you next time --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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