a-plus-downloader

Script for downloading student data from an A+ course. You can download data for all students or some of them, or all data for your own user account. The script downloads data to a directory structure like this: course/user/module/exercise/submission.

The data includes submitted files and metadata about the modules, exercises and submissions (including the points).

Usage example

Create a Python virtual environment and install the dependencies.

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Copy your personal A+ access token (XYZ) from your A+ user profile page. This example downloads data for student with the student ID 123456 in the course with A+ course instance ID 150 into the directory downloads.

./aplus_downloader.py set-domain --api-token XYZ plus.cs.aalto.fi
./aplus_downloader.py download -c id=150 -u sid=123456 downloads

A+ Downloader saves the domain and token settings in the configuration file _config/config.ini.

The A+ ids of courses can be found in the A+ API at https://aplusdomain/api/v2/courses/. In the Aalto University case, the direct URL is https://plus.cs.aalto.fi/api/v2/courses/. The parameter sid specifies the university-wide student ID. Aalto University student IDs are six digits, or in older IDs, five digits following an uppercase alphabet. If you want to specify students by A+ user ID, use the subparameter id instead.

The sid can be used multiple times to include multiple students.

If you later want to re-run the script to download later submissions from the same students, you must first clear the local cache. This is done with the command:

rm -rf _cache

It seems that this is required because the A+ downloader uses an exercise score cache to iterate through submissions, but if the cache directory exists, it is not updated.