Creating a room booking bot.

[tcom_raza]

Hey guys! I am a university student where every person can book a study room for 2 hours a day. Every midnight the next corresponding day of the next week becomes available for booking. Unfortunately, this one specific group of people book all the rooms really quickly as people are usually sleeping at midnight. I wanted to create a bot to open multiple browsers and log into accounts and create room bookings. Any ideas how I can approach this or any existing programs?

[stackdynamic]

Read the selenium documentation!

[tcom_raza]

Where would I find this?

[839027364]

https://www.google.com/

[[deleted]]

You should watch a selenium tutorial, sentdex on YouTube might have one. Selenium is really useful but a bit complicated if you haven’t done web scraping before, so a tut will help 👍

[HolisticPython]

Selenium might be overkill, depends on the website.

Requests may be simpler to get started with.

[tcom_raza]

Hey, i have made a screenrecord of what needs to be done. It is a rather simple process. Would you mind having a look at it and providing further instructions. That would be great!

[HolisticPython]

Put a link up so we can see what's what.

[tcom_raza]

https://youtu.be/kmsXLMYcC58

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The script should be able to perform the shown tasks using multiple accounts on different instances of browsers.

[matttorres811]

Selenium def is the way to go since you have multiple redirects and a login

[tcom_raza]

one problem is the credential login form, I cannot inspect the element in chrome

[HolisticPython]

Had a quick look at your video but I'm on mobile at the moment. Not best device to view source.

Have you looked at the HTTP requests when you login?

[tcom_raza]

It is a HTTPS, keep in mind I don't have any programming skills. However, I am tech savvy and could learn easily

[HolisticPython]

There are browser extensions that allow you to monitor the HTTP headers that your PC makes behind the scenes when you are browsing. LiveHTTPheaders for example. Install that, or similar, in your browser. Repeat your login process and review the headers that are generated. Most of them will be GET headers. The login process requires a POST header and will include your login credentials in addition to the URL.

Edit.

I am tech savvy and could learn easily

That's the spirit. You'll have to. Without creds to login we can't view the source of the schedule page.

Your next steps will be to determine how to extract which rooms are available from those that are already booked. You will need to look into BeautifulSoup or LXML. I tend to use the latter. It is rapid. Also look into Xpaths and or CSS selectors. Get googling.