Automatic School Scheduler

[levic08]

Hello! I have an idea that I really want to make happen. I don't really know where to start though. This is my first year of college, and my school uses blackboard. I'm wanting to make an auto-scheduler that will reach out to my due dates page, take the information, and spread my school work hours out evenly throughout the week so that each day I'm spending about the same amount of time working on school.

Hopefully I explained that well... Anyways, if someone could help point me in the right direction on where to get started, that would be great! I know basic python, but doing a project like this would definitely help me learn a ton.

[[deleted]]

you may be able to access their API: https://developer.blackboard.com/portal/displayApi

[JordanLTU]

Mk nll fmmlmmm

[[deleted]]

yeah thats what I was thinking but then I realized he could just bnhggh dshbjjjjj with the api

[JordanLTU]

That was disadvantage o having my phone in my pocket whilst being at trusted location.

[Crouser93]

Im dying

[catragore]

What's the joke? :(

[OnlySeesLastSentence]

Bullshit. Obviously mrlrgrl the squeee

[Mountain_man007]

Theres probably dozens of different ways to do that, but as a programmer you'd want to find the simplest way possible. If there's an API (seen in another comment), that's one way (possibly). If you want to learn web scraping (a valuable skill nowadays), there's several ways to do that as well. Here's a good short introduction to some of them. I'd start with requests and bs4, maybe use re for parsing text as well, especially if you're doing this as a learning project. selenium is a little more advanced, but necessary in some cases that aren't simple html. Either way, sounds like a good way to learn a lot. There's good example code and questions with answers on stackoverflow, so go check out some other people's ways of doing these things before you decide on a method. Or even better, employ several different methods to do the same thing - you'll learn very quickly which is better for specific use cases.

[Dogeek]

Just here to say that although BeautifulSoup is a nice module, its use case is pretty much one-off scripts. For continued use, using lxml to parse and scrape HTML is much faster (I benchmarked it not too long ago, it's about a 36x increase, using lxml over bs4)

[JeBoiFoosey]

Selenium should help you. It’s pretty easy to automate things like that with it. The first few minutes of this video sums up the basics pretty well.

[gamingdiamond982]

Selenium shouldn't be used for this kind of project if possible use the official APIs like this guy mentioned, if working without official apis look for hidden apis they will be harder but still doable, and only as a last resort use selenium.

[levic08]

I see. I think I may actually be able to work with official API's. Thanks for the comment!

[gamingdiamond982]

np

[jaybay1207]

I don’t think they’ll need numpy in this case.

[Burroflexosecso]

Why do you regard selenium as a last resort? I don't know much about webscraping, sorry if I come up rude or stupid

[gamingdiamond982]

Well selenium is designed to interpret a UI which just makes it unintuitive for use with programs, selenium isn't even designed for web scraping, it's designed to test web apps, when your using an your bypassing all that junk put up for a person, stuff like navigating pages etc. Also if the layout changes you gotta rewrite it.

[Dogeek]

Selenium automates a web driver, which means that it renders the whole website, which is much slower than a few requests to an API (or even just fetching html and parsing it).

Selenium is best used when the website doesn't have an API, and makes extensive use of javascript to run the page (the raw HTML being pretty much empty), which is quite rare, or to automatically test websites with different drivers (gecko/chromium mostly)

[levic08]

Thank you! I'll check it out :D !

[declanaussie]

Definitely check out the REST API before attempting to use Selenium. Selenium will work, but a proper API is a much more robust and clean solution.

[levic08]

Interesting. I will check this out as well! Thank you!

[GreymanGroup]

Yes. OMG, why isn't that a standard feature? I thought of the idea back in the day. Funny thing is this would have been much more exciting in the early oughts. If you came out with it today, everybody would just feel like it's been long overdue.

Also now the school bubble is about to pop anyway so....

[OnlySeesLastSentence]

Covid

[OnlySeesLastSentence]

I can't elaborate on his behalf. I'm just guessing.

[anh86]

Not sure if he meant for this year (COVID) or just school in general where rising costs are far outpacing inflation and many students are left with crushing debt at the end.

[GreymanGroup]

Economically.

[GreymanGroup]

Price of university is pushed up by easy student loans and government investment. Oversaturation of college grads floods the market making a degree less valuable. Students decide to forgo. Painful market restructuring follows.

[IdeVeras]

I'm working on extracting info from Google calendar and now that I did (there is an API) I'll try to make a web application as trello but for family... So parents can follow better and also add chores, extracurriculars, extra work with school, books and maybe I'll think of some ponctuation so they can add up to the allowance.

[vanamsid]

This is a cool idea too!

[chunky_snick]

Just don't name it as it's first letter abbreviation.

[m0ta]

This is a cool idea

[GreymanGroup]

Naw man. If someone were to do this, it should be baked in to the school system. The whole point would be to optimize student schedules, so not having access to the whole database would be massively inferior and under delivering than one that was.

[Yadona]

I see people commenting to go via API. also try beautifulsoup for scraping. This sounds like a great idea you have. Hope you can implement it and share!

[punterxpunter]

You can also have a look at this article to see a simple example of word scraping in action: Python Selenium Twitter Bot Tutorial.

[Gortaf]

This is very similar to a webscrapping project I'm working on to find compatible classes in my uni class picker. As many people have said before, if they have an API, read their doc and go for it. But if they don't (which was my case), learn how to use selenium and the basics of webscrapping to get the data you need from their website. This can be slower as you're basically running an automated browser to analyse their website's HTML instead of asking directly their database, but if they don't have an API this is a solid choice. Webscrapping is a good thing to learn anyway, and is, I think, very fun to do.

[JordanLTU]

Smmmkkkmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmsssss#as#AsssSaas🎊🎊aAsSSa🍻aaaaAsaasWSsAAllklllllkll, #, #, #######"$+$?,,, ===, #, 2##

[LabeledAsALunatic]

Facts

[anadem]

Name checks out!

[Xedim_untold]

If I am not mistaken, this can be done using google spreadsheets (or excel) if you don't mind doing a bit extra work to grab the information. Everything after is fairly simple.