fsubot 0.4.1

Base bot for developing FSU bots.

A bot which serves as the foundation for other bots for use on the Florida State University website. It is useful for automating tasks that are otherwise very menial and tedious.

This project serves as a framework for creating bots which are designed for Florida State University websites. It handles logging into MyFSU automatically, and setting up ubiquitous attributes and functionality such as:

1. Standard argument parsing

2. Logging into MyFSU

3. Web browser driver handling.

Where to Begin

Package Installation

Install the FSUBot package using pip.

$ pip install fsubot

If you receive a error 13 and/or a permission error, prefer:

$ pip install fsubot --user

rather than:

sudo pip install fsubot

Driver Installation

Download and install any driver from the following (I prefer chromedriver):

• Chrome: chromedriver

• Firefox: geckodriver

  • There has not been extensive testing using geckodriver, proceed with caution.

Ensure that the driver executable is located within your environment’s PATH variable. There are many readily available guides on Google for how to do this.

Bot Instantiation

If you instantiate your bot with the following:

fsu_dr = FSUBot(use_cli=True)

Then, you can pass in arguments like so:

$ python fsubot/bot.py --fsu-id abc13 --fsu-pw hunter2 --browser chrome --executable-path drivers/chromedriver

Examples

• Vindicta, my personal bot which automatically enrolls for desired courses.

• EasyGradeBot, my personal bot which traverses through a list of BlackBoard Smart View pages and downloads all submitted assignment’s most recently submitted attempts.

Page Navigation Information

After instantiating your bot, named bot, there are a few methods you can use for traversing the DOM and navigating to different pages.

Method 1

Use bot.dr, the accessible selenium.webdriver instance, and the well-documented Selenium API.

Method 2

{
    "pages": [
        {
            "title": "",
            "iframe": false,
            "xpath": "",
            "css_selector": ""
        },

        {
            "title": "",
            "iframe": false,
            "xpath": "",
            "css_selector": ""
        },

        {
            "title": "",
            "iframe": false,
            "xpath": "",
            "css_selector": ""
        },

        {
            "title": "",
            "iframe": false,
            "xpath": "",
            "css_selector": ""
        },

        {
            "title": "",
            "iframe": false,
            "xpath": "",
            "css_selector": ""
        },

        {
            "title": "",
            "iframe": false,
            "xpath": "",
            "css_selector": ""
        }
    ]
}

The elements will be sequentially passed to bot._click and clicked as if a real user was clicking them.

• title is used for logging purposes, to indicate when clicking an element has succeeded.

• iframe is used to specify if the following css_selector or xpath will resolve to an iframe, which should thusly be focused on (review Selenium’s API for focusing on an iframe).

• xpath is used to specify the xpath for resolving an element to be clicked.

• css_selector is used to specify the CSS selector for resolving an element to be clicked.