This is a work in progress designed to provide programatic access to the course management functionality within Columbia University's SSOL (Student Services Online) via Ruby. Currently functionality is limited to reading data out of SSOL, but write methods are in the works.
To use the library, require it in your application and instantiate a new SSOL object using your UNI. The SSOL class requires your credentials to be passed in the form of a hash with keys :id and :password.
require "./ssol"
ssol = SSOL.new({:id => 'your_uni', :password => 'your_password'})The SSOL class exposes the following public methods:
registration_appointments: Returns an Array of hashes with :start and :end keys.registration_appointment?(time): Returns true if the given time (defaults to Time.now) is a registration appointmentquery_class(query): Searches for classes based on the provided query and returns an array of classes with all available attributes.
SSOL handles sessions in a very unusual and unpredictable way. This library is designed to make a string of requests to SSOL at one time. Any code that stored an SSOL object for use at a later time could create unpredictable results and would probably break. While it's certainly less efficient to create a new session every time the class is instantiated, it also eliminates login-related edge cases.
All interaction with SSOL is handled by Mechanize, an automated web interaction library for Ruby that uses Nokogiri to parse HTML. Unlike Selenium, Mechanize is not a browser automation tool, which makes it much lighter. Run gem install mechanize to install or just use bundle.
The original motivation for creating this library was to solve the problem of limited class availability by automating class availability checks and registering when slots opened. I didn't need that this semester, so now this has become a side project for me.
- Improved code structure
- RSpec testing
- Write methods, especially the ability to add and drop classes
- Read methods for:
- The schedule and exams page, including the ability to render a schedule to .ics
- Grades
Copyright © 2013 Ben Drucker
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