Context Module Goodies

I just finished documenting and packaging two utilities that might be of use to teams that are building context modules.

Both utilites were originally written as part of the SEAS Course Evaluation system ( http://oracle.seas.columbia.edu/wces/ ), but they offer functionality that is just as useful here as it is there.

Both utilites come with complete source code.

Regripper 1.1
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This is a standalone windows program written in Delphi (Pascal) that crawls the registrar's online class database ( http://www.columbia.edu/cu/bulletin/uwb/ ) and dumps information about all classes into a csv (comma separated value) file. The csv file it produces can be loaded by excel or imported directly into a database. Inside the csv file is the latest information about class times and locations and enrollments. It also includes a myriad of course identifiers which are explained in the documentation.

AffilGrabber
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Affilgrabber is an server-side ActiveX control written in Visual C++.

(Server side activex controls are different from the interactive client side applets that are embedded within web pages. A server-side control is just a collection of properties and methods that can be called from within a coldfusion page as it generates normal html output.)

Afilgrabber checks to see whether an user's AcIS username and password are valid. If so it returns data about that person including an list of that person's current and past class enrollments, a list of schools the person is affilated with and what of their status at that school (student or professor). It also returns the person's email address if it is not the same as their columbia id.

Afilgrabber works by using the acis's CheeseWhiz system ( http://www.columbia.edu/acis/rad/authmethods/cheesewhiz/ ) on www1.columbia.edu. It retrieves the data using two GPL'd libraries 

  OpenSSL ( https://www.openssl.org )
  LibcURL ( http://curl.haxx.se/ )

Also included is a demo page that uses the control written in ColdFusion. There are two more versions of the page written in ASP and PHP.


Both programs are quite short (affilgrabber is 90 lines long, regripper is around 500 lines) and can be modified as neccessary. They can be downloaded
at

  http://oracle.seas.columbia.edu/source/ .

I hope they can be useful.

- Russ