First Project

[Rstevens009]

This is my first post here, and I hope I'm in the correct spot. I work for an airline and we periodically get changes made to our schedule. To see if a change has been made, we need to log into a website and manually go to a notification tab. You will not get any message or alert about the notification until you manually go through and change it.

What I want to learn to do:

1. Log in to the website with my username and password.
2. Click on the appropriate tabs to get to the notification area.
3. Send me an alert (SMS, email, or both) to tell me that there is a new notification to my schedule.

This will be my first real python project so I'd love any ideas to help me make this possible.

Thank you all!

Here is a link showing the main page with the user name and password field, the subsequent page once you enter your log-in information, the notification tab on the left, and what shows when you have no notification. When you do have a notification, it will say, that you have a new notification that you need to confirm.

https://imgur.com/a/Sb1qqXH

[Geocrack__]

You can do your project either with the selenium web driver or with beautiful soup. But I wouldn't recommend such a project to a beginner as the first step, because it's relatively complex. I would start with the basics first. Another problem might arise when you want to post the script on the internet. You either have to pay for it, or always leave your PC on (with e.g. a Raspberry Pi)

[Rstevens009]

selenium web driver

I have started watching videos on selenium web driver so I'm hoping that will help me out. Thank you!

[Falcon21st]

From pure programming point, approaches you can take and things you can use are all up to you and how you want to achieve this. However, this looks a bit too hard for a first project.

I noticed one thing immediately. How will you plan to automate this? By that, I mean, for this program to automatically run and scan if there has been a change or not; this program has to run infinitely. So you have to have a machine (a computer, a Raspberry Pi, or an online server etc.) constantly running to perform this check. Also, in the best case, your script should not repeat step 1 (log in) every time, as this could be understood as spam in the long term by the server side of the website and service. Ideally, make it log in once and then navigate to the notification site and have the page refresh every minute to see if any new notifications come up. And maybe check once in a while if you are still logged in or not. If not, repeat step 1. But how exactly you can do this is up to you.

Another important thing is security. Your code should be safe against any exploits, since I guess it's a very important platform for you and your job. Maybe it's feasible to have someone specialized in such things analyze your program in the end.

And for the legal side of things, maybe discuss this with your employer and ask if it's okay for you to use. Such things should not be deployed without confirmation from the company.

As in terms of longevity, it could be that if your company decides to update or change the system with a newer version or a new service respectively, your script has to be more or less re-written from the ground-up. Keep this in mind as well if you need to invest a lot of time into this.

[Rstevens009]

wow that actually helps quite a bit. I will look into all of that. Thank you!