powerschool webscraper?

[Bill Freeman]

Not that I know of an existing tool (BeautifulSoup probably doesn't deal
with the JavaScript), but it seems like you want to capture the eventual
DOM.  You need something that you can trigger when the page has settled.  A
manual way might be to use firebug (assuming that firefox works with the
site), although I'm not sure that saving the DOM to a file is built in.
The Greasemonkey add on for firefox may let you automate it more.  If you
can't save to a file, you might be able to post it to a local server,
though cross site scripting protections in your browser could get in the
way.  One approach would be to pop up an extra div with the extracted stuff
that would be suitable for copy from the browser and paste to a file.

A little more googling lead me to the "DOM Inspector" firefox add on, which
might do the trick without fiddling.

On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 2:56 PM, David Rysdam <david at rysdam.org> wrote:

> The Milford school district uses this "PowerSchool" web thing so parents
> can check on kids' grades (middle school and up). It's pretty useful,
> for those teachers that update at a reasonable frequency.
>
> However, there's no change detection. I guess I have to have memorized
> all the grades, outstanding assignments, etc for each child so I can see
> what's different when I check the next time. "Huh...it's 90% now. Was it
> 91% yesterday? Maybe I should click through and see if he flunked
> something."
>
> I figured I'd do a simple little script that would download the page and
> just do a diff. Not so fast--it's hidden behind javascript.
>
> I know this would be trivial for someone who has done this. Heck, it
> would probably be trivial for me if I didn't have 100 other projects
> going and I had time to learn the tools (looks like "htmlunit" in this
> case). However, it suddenly occurred to me that someone may have
> *already* done this, maybe even for Milford's particular installation.
>
> So...have you?
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