powerschool webscraper?

Bill Freeman ke1g.nh at gmail.com
Wed Oct 29 15:26:40 EDT 2014


There is a "Save back to file from DOM" firefox add on.  I don't know
whether it requires that the page was loaded from a file.

On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 3:21 PM, Bill Freeman <ke1g.nh at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
>>> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
>>> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
>>>
>>
>>
>
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