Automate logging in to your bank and credit card accounts to retrieve your current balance and transaction data.
Banks often provide API access to retrieve transaction data, but the chances of the API working for open source users seems to be slim at best. It has certainly never worked for me, but maybe I’m just slow.
The next best option is to automate the process of logging in to the account website to retrieve data. That’s right, it’s 2010 and we’re talking about screen scraping.
Bankscraper uses the watir library to drive a browser. The project is user driven: any banks or credit cards that are supported by bankscraper are used by one or more of the developers.
Two actions are being implemented: login and current balance retrieval. Once the basic mechanics of those two tasks are handled, we will figure out how to download CSV transaction data from the sites. What else would you like to see bankscraper do?
I’m struggling with the best way to test the library. How does one effectively write an automated test suite for a library that logs in to sensitive and personal websites to retrieve data? I’m not volunteering to check in a file with my discovercard.com credentials just for the sake of an automated test suite.
Do we mock all of the credit card interactions for most of the tests, but then have a test that hits the login page of each provider to look for changes to the structure? Changes to the login page might be the canary that can notify us of site wide changes?
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Fork the project.
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Make your feature addition or bug fix.
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Add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.
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Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
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Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.
Copyright © 2010 Tim Freund. See LICENSE for details.