Schd Exporter

— Course Schedule Exporter for BIT (Terminated)

This page is introducing an ongoing project, and more details are subject to be added.

This was an experimental project, which provides a tool for the students in Beijing Institute of Technology to export their course schedule to the iCalendar (ics) format. The exported ics file is good for importing the schedule to Google Calendar and mobile devices.

Try It! (Terminated)

Features

The tool crawls the schedule of the user by logging into the user’s Banner account (BIT Banner does not provide any thing like OAuth or API at all), parses his schedule, converts all the date into the human’s date format, and exports to an iCalendar file. The tool now supports Simplified Chinese and English.

Challenge: Connecting to BIT’s Intranet

The Banner System of Beijing Institute of Technology is shielded by their campus intranet, which is supposed to be inaccessible from the clients outside the campus, even though they do provide a cripple limited VPN service with charges.

Such challenge has been solved by my a sub-project, called DPRBIT, which provides an alive secured tunnel to their intranet. I am going to provide public service based on this sub-project to BIT students who are overseas and have to regularly access to those shielded systems of BIT. This project is also going to aid NetPioneer Association in BIT to provide services for not only the intranet users, but also the Internet users.

Challenge: Fetching the First Day in Academic Calendar

BIT undergraduate office really likes to use the week number in academic calendar to denote the date of scheduled exams or date range of courses. However, the academic calendar is normally different from year to year due to the public holiday schedule, which are decided by Chinese Central Government every year manually. To make it worse, the academic calendar is distributed by hard copy and scanned image (sometimes it can be a table) each year without an obvious pattern.

This project fetches the first day of the current semester and is going to provide an API for it.