

bb: Command line Blackboard client/scraper - cel
https://github.com/RocHack/bb

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

[0] [http://www.instructure.com/](http://www.instructure.com/)

~~~
cel
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](https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms)

~~~
jenseng
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](https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/index.html)

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

~~~
doc_holliday
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.

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

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josePhoenix
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.

~~~
cel
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.

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grrowl
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.

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

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jingo
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.

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

"Requirements

bash curl sed openssl or python"

~~~
jingo
"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.

