Course Section Generator

The Course Section Generator scrapes the courses.students.ubc.ca website to get the sections for the specified year, term, and department codes.

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine.

Prerequisites

Install Node 8.0.0 or greater.
Install Git.

Installing and Setup

First, clone this repo. git clone https://github.com/UBC-LFS/lfs-course-section-scraper.git
Then cd into the repo. cd lfs-course-section-scraper
Run the installation script. npm install (If you see babel-node: command not found, you've missed this step.)
Run using npm start or node app.js (both are equivalent).
A command line prompt will show up. Select the needed options and the script will run with the options selected.
Open output folder and you will find a csv named by year and term put together (e.g. '2018S.csv').

Note

Department Selections

By default, this app displays the course codes associated with LFS. If you want to run with different course codes, you can do so by editing the constants.js file and adding your course code to both title and value fields, as shown below. By default, all depts are selected.

{ title: 'All of them', value: 'all', selected: true },
{ title: 'APBI', value: 'APBI' },
{ title: 'FNH', value: 'FNH' },
{ title: 'FOOD', value: 'FOOD' },
{ title: 'FRE', value: 'FRE' },
{ title: 'GRS', value: 'GRS' },
{ title: 'HUNU', value: 'HUNU' },
{ title: 'LFS', value: 'LFS' },
{ title: 'LWS', value: 'LWS' },
{ title: 'PLNT', value: 'PLNT' },
{ title: 'SOIL', value: 'SOIL' }

Filterable Activities

I've added all the activities I've encountered so far, but I may be missing some, so you can add them into the constants.js file by adding both the title and value fields of the activity, as shown below. Also, by default, Waiting List, Thesis, and Work Placement are selected. You can modify this by setting selected: false, and you can add more defaults by adding selected: true as needed.

{ title: 'Waiting List', value: 'Waiting List', selected: true },
{ title: 'Thesis', value: 'Thesis', selected: true },
{ title: 'Work Placement', value: 'Work Placement', selected: true },
{ title: 'Practicum', value: 'Practicum' },
{ title: 'Directed Studies', value: 'Directed Studies' },
{ title: 'Seminar', value: 'Seminar' },
{ title: 'Lecture', value: 'Lecture' },
{ title: 'Web-Oriented Course', value: 'Web-Oriented Course' },
{ title: 'Distance Education', value: 'Distance Education' },
{ title: 'Essay/Report', value: 'Essay/Report' },
{ title: 'Tutorial', value: 'Tutorial' },
{ title: 'Project', value: 'Project' },
{ title: 'Laboratory', value: 'Laboratory' }

Enrolments

There is no way to access enrolment data through the API, so I am scraping the enrolments directly from the webpage itself. This means that if the Seat Summary table changes in structure, it may break the enrolment scraping. Currently the scraping depends on exact string match of the following: 'Total Seats Remaining:', 'Currently Registered:', 'General Seats Remaining:', 'Restricted Seats Remaining*:'.

If it breaks, make a Pull Request or create an Issue and I'll go fix it.

Authors

Justin Lee (https://github.com/justin0022)

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

UBC-LFS/lfs-course-section-scraper