powerschool webscraper?

Bill Freeman ke1g.nh at gmail.com
Wed Oct 29 15:21:30 EDT 2014


And further reading suggests that DOM Inspector's save to file
functionality has been removed.  You might be able to get an old version,
though that could require an old version of firefox.

On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 3:18 PM, Bill Freeman <ke1g.nh at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>>
>
>
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