Electric Paoge. Browser Scripting with imacros in Illuminate

Transcription

1 Electric Paoge Browser Scripting with imacros in Illuminate

2 Browser Scripting with imacros in Illuminate Welcome Find the latest version of this presentation, plus related materials, at Your presenter: Casey Mirch, a data geek and ISI/DnA sysadmin at Leadership Public Schools, a charter school management organization with 4 high schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. cmirch@leadps.org

3 Why imacros?

4 Why imacros? Use Cases Browser scripting automates your web browser like there s a user clicking through. Mass data updates Tedious, repetitive tasks Frequently-repeated activities Guided or supervised navigation

5 Why imacros? Pair Share Take a few minutes to think of and describe something like: A simple, tedious task that you or a colleague has had to perform in Illuminate, or A potentially useful application of Illuminate that didn t happen because some straightforward part of it was just too time-consuming.

6 Why imacros? Benefits of Scripting Speed Accuracy Consistency Of course, there are disadvantages: Testing Unexpected results

7 Why imacros? Alternatives for Input Sending a file to the help desk Core Imports Mass Student Update (from a Custom Report) Assessments, Summary Assessments, and Demographic Repositories State/Known Data Imports Someday, a general mass update feature API, Greasemonkey, curl, Javascript, PHP, etc.

8 Why imacros? Alternatives for Output Web scraping pales in utility to the alternatives provided by Illuminate. Custom Reports BI Tool (Jasper Reports) SQL

9 Getting Started with imacros

10 Getting Started Available Editions Free browser extensions/add-ons Mozilla Firefox Google Chrome Internet Explorer Commercial editions

11 Getting Started Recording a Macro

12 Editing Your Macros Seeing Illuminate as imacros sees it

13 Editing Your Macros Adding Comments A single-quote (') at the start of a line marks the whole line as a comment that the imacros interpreter will ignore. Unfortunately, there s no way to mark part of a line as a comment. Future-you will thank past-you for including plenty of comments that explain what the commands do and why they look as they do.

14 Editing Your Macro The URL Command GOTO= the URL you want to visit. You can skip a lot of steps by loading a URL that specifies precisely the record you want. Understand how a URL is put together: The sensible query strings used throughout Illuminate make building scripts that much easier. Example: Watch how the URL changes as we use the New Student Search link.

15 Editing Your Macros Inspecting Elements You can View Source, but finding the things you want involves a lot of searching and scrolling. Right-click something to which you want imacros to do something and Inspect Element. The thing defined by an opening HTML tag is an <element>. Important information about an element is specified in attribute="value" stuff inside its opening tag.

16 Editing Your Macro The TAG Command POS= serial position of element meeting the specified criteria TYPE= element type, or what s after the < that opens the HTML tag FORM= for data entry forms, an way to identify which form in the page to look at ATTR= a set of attributes and values by which the target HTML element can be recognized CONTENT= the value to fill into a data entry control in a form

17 Editing Your Macros Using CSV Data Files File format: comma-delimited, UTF-8 (with BOM) Delimiter character can be specified with SET, but it can t see a tab Substituting variables Looping a macro

18 Editing Your Macros Some Tricky Cases Radio buttons have the same ID for all options. WAIT for AJAX calls. Student Demographics pages: Some fields pages need to be clicked-on before they exist in an editable state. Auto-completing text boxes don t work like standard dropdown lists. But there are solutions.

19 Executing Your Macros

20 Executing Your Macros Test your Macro PAUSE will pause execution of the macro until you click the Continue button. Add a PAUSE wherever you want to verify that the right thing is happening while you test your macro. You can use PAUSE in macros where you know in advance most, but not all, of what you want to happen.

21 Executing Your Macros Session State Be mindful of things about your activity that are known by the Illuminate server but aren t specified explicitly. Including student_id=<some ID> in the URL changes the currently active student. Menu items for student pages don t include a student_id in the URL, so they just open that page for the latest student specified, which could be different from the student shown on the page. Execute imacros in a private/incognito window to avoid manual and scripted activity polluting each other s session state at the server. (If you have to log in again to launch your macro, that s a sign of isolation.)

22 Putting It All Together Examples

23 Examples Use CSV Data CSV open URLs serially.iim opens a list of full URLs in a text file. Techniques demonstrated: Loops through a macro using CSV data. Parse and construct a URL in Illuminate.

24 Examples Search by State ID CSV open SSIDs in tabs.iim opens a list of students by searching for their SSIDs. Opens and switches to tabs. Fills in form data. Selects an item in a dropdown list.

25 Examples Request Class Ranks GPA calc CSV create rankings.iim refreshes GPAs for many grades calculations sites. Changes Control Panel state. Fills in more form data. Identifies a radio button using two attributes. WAITs, so an AJAX call has some time to complete.

26 Examples Share Assessments Assessment CSV share with admins.iim shares benchmark Assessments consistently. Impersonates a different user. Preloads form data using URL query string parameters. Fills in yet more forms, including check-boxes.

27 Examples Save PDF Reports Assessment Section CSV save Prebuilts.iim saves a bunch of Assessment reports. Preloads form data using URL query string parameters. Requests and saves downloads into organized folders and file names.

28 Examples Other Possibilities Mass drops for rescheduling afterschool tutoring/support rosters. Publish sections after importing final grades from a 3 rd -party grade book. Populate past CELDT scores for incoming students. Enable portal access for Contacts entered without it.

29 Browser Scripting with imacros in Illuminate Thank You! Find the latest version of this presentation, plus sample macros and related materials, at If you found this helpful, advocate with your Implementation Manager for better alternatives: the mass data updates feature on the roadmap adequate documentation for core imports retiring the idea that core imports are not intended for ongoing use with ISI Or, suggest other improvements by submitting a Feature Request.