In order to fill out your PS I or PS II preferences, you have to use the BITS PS department's portal.
There you'll find this absolutely beautiful UI (note the sarcasm in my voice here) where you have to slowly drag and drop hundred of tiles to get the ordering you want. No filters, no sorting tools, nothing. Everything has to be done manually. This is slow, painful, and completely pointless.
Let's make something here clear: The portal's UI is absolutely stupid and damn painful to use. Who ever made this portal is a complete idiot. Let's just leave it at that (but seriously, what the heck were they thinking?!).
I didn't want to put up with that BS so I took the time to analyze the portal (using Burp Suite) and then build this tool where you can simply create a text file with the order you want, specify your username, password and what cities you can provide your own accommodation in, and then run this script and be done with it.
You'll need Python 3 to run the script and Pip for Python 3 to install some dependencies for this script.
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Clone this repo. If you have git then use:
git clone https://github.com/Hypro999/psfill.gitIf you don't then you can simply download a zip file for this code and then extract it. -
Create a credentials file. To do this, create a file called "credentials.txt" inside this repo and in it, add your credentials like so:
username: mybitsemailid
password: mypsdportalpassword
If you want to specify which cities you can provide acco for, then you can specify them as comma separated values
under a acco field. For example:
acco: Hyderabad
or
acco: Hyderabad, Bangalore
Mind the case though. Cities are proper nouns and should be capitalized ;)
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Now specify your preference order in the stations.txt file. For the sake of an example I've pre-populated this with the stations for the PS II of 2020-2021 Semester 1 as of Jun 28th, 2020, alphabetically ordered. If you need to update this, then use a script to generate a default list (or do it manually if you enjoy pain). Now you can easily reorder these to your liking (e.g. in vim you can use stuff like
d5jto take a block of stations and then move them to the wherever you want. In other text editors you can select multiple lines using the shift key or your mouse. You get the idea). -
Install the required dependencies. Since this code uses the requests library and beautifulsoup4 we will need to install them and their dependencies. This is pretty easy, just run
pip install -r requirements.txtfrom inside the repo (folder). For people already comfortable with Python, you can use a virtualenvironment since even if you have the libraries, the versions might differ. -
Now all we have to do is run the script with
python main.py. -
Login to the portal and just make sure that everything looks alright. Don't blame me if something goes wrong, use this script at your own risk (though it should be pretty safe to use, I've tested it quite a bit).
Note: This tool hasn't been dockerized since that would be pretty unnecessary/overkill for a simple tool like this which has only a few dependencies and can easily be run cross-platform.
Want to contribute and make this script better? Awesome! Just open a PR or an issue and we can talk about it. I'd be really happy to merge good changes into this codebase.