DYP-flask

A Flask API that filters through the bloat to deliver the relevant student information in a JSON format, ready to be used by any application.

Here is the official site for reference.

Setup Instructions

The following command will install every dependency needed for the API to run. Naturally, since it abstracts over the old but official website, you must have valid student credentials to actually use this API. _{I will create a dummy account accessible by anyone eventually, for demonstration purposes.}

On Linux

python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

On Windows

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

How it works

Overview

The Official site is often slow to load, has session cookies that expire quickly, and redirects the user a bit too much. It also prevents downloading of study materials, which combined with its unreliable speed, and a hard-to-use PDF viewer makes for an uncomfortable experience.

These, and some other issues are addressed. The DYP-Flask API only fetches the data that is relevant and most commonly fetched. That being the Student Attendance Stat & Subject specific .ppt/.pdf/.docx files. This is achieved by manually isolating the requests that contain this information, and only loading that specific part of the page. Since the website uses server side rendering, the returned content has to be parsed and packaged into JSON objects. The application can then implement caching to prevent unnecessary login requests, for merely seeing the data stored.

The DYP-flask also aims to provide downloadable links to the study materials for each subject, preventing the need to make unnecessary subsequent requests for previously seen content, while giving the end user the choice to use their own viewer. Yet again, something lacking in the official site.

Stuff Used

The following were used while working on this project:

• Flask
• Python's built-in requests (sessions mainly)
• Postman
• mitmproxy (for finding endpoints, hidded/obfuscated by redirects)
• BeautifulSoup with lxml (for extracting data from SSR'ed HTML response, into a JSON Object)

To Do

- ❌ Complete this readme.md file
- ✅ Handle different types of links: flexpaper, presentation, docx, redirected page with downloadable links
- ✅ Rate Limiting, to prevent abuse