bb: Command line Blackboard client/scraper | Hacker News Reader

bb: Command line Blackboard client/scraper

github.com

39 pointscel15 comments

Would be cool if there was this type of tool for canvas[0] as that what my school and most are schools switching to.

Looks like it's open source [0]. If they have a clean API it might be doable without scraping.

[0] https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms

The API is pretty comprehensive, and is growing daily. With the exception of some legacy features, all of the web app's UI is built on top of it, as are the mobile apps.

https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/index.html

My University (the University of Aberdeen) uses Blackboard, I wonder if it mightn't be less horrible than the web interface.

It could be worse. It could be one of the many buggy, insecure home-grown solutions RGU has used in the past.

AFAIK they use Moodle now and it's leaps and bound better (more reliable, more secure, easier to use) than any of the previous solutions.

University of Aberdeen alumni here, do they still use the awful portal for timetables? I got half way through writing an Android app for parsing it and displaying it in a clearer way last year.

I'm not sure if I'm familiar with the system you refer to, apparently they overhauled everything recently, and I'm a fresher.

Cool stuff. I once had something similar for the scary-sounding Jenzabar LMS that I used in college.

Have you tried this on other Blackboard deployments? Looks like the QuikPay stuff at least is U. of Rochester-specific.

I haven't tried it on other Blackboard deployments. I hope if someone is interested in doing so they may try it out, either as a fork or by making bb more general. I would expect to find issues with differences in the HTML which would have to be handled appropriately.

The QuikPay and Sequoia stuff is specific to institutions/installations that have integrated with those companies, which includes some other than rochester.edu, but of course not all.

Great work. Having tacked something similar in my uni days (gosh, 6 years ago now) I know the pain that is the Blackboard interface and system.

Looks pretty useful. Unfortuantely, (or rather fortuneately from what I have heard) my shcool just switched from Blackboard to Canvas.

It is a (rare) pleasure to see a simple solution posted to HN that does not require Python or some other scripting language. Or GNU sed for that matter.

I no longer have a Blackboard account, but if I did, or had a guest account to play with, I would try rewriting your Bash script in POSIX-like sh.

Nice work and a good choice of project.

It actually does require sed, and either python or openssl.

"Requirements

bash curl sed openssl or python"

"GNU sed" has "features" not always found in all other sed's elsewhere, outside of GNU/Linux.

You can substitute other tcp clients for curl.

And the openssl binary is ubiquitous, so he is smart to use it for generating base64 versus other userland utilities for generating base64 that are not always found outside of GNU/Linux.

Yes, the bash script could be made more portable. Also there are some GNU-specific sed features used, but I'm sure that could be changed to be more portable as well. Python or openssl is used for some base64 encoding.

I like using shell scripts for projects like this because of the power of piping commands/functions and doing line-based processing with e.g. sed.

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