ID Mapping using Selenium

Python
Pandas
Selenium
Author

Waseem Waheed

Published

August 15, 2019

Context

At work, we have to keep track of the progress of students where each student is identified by their ID (matching by the name is a tricky thing and not reliable).

The problem

Instead of a single ID, students have two!

You may say, that should be fine, you must have a database mapping those IDs to each other isn’t it? and the answer is yes but, there is a BUT, I can access one student at a time through an online portal, which is kinda fun, you know πŸ™„.

The solution

But, then you may say, hang on, the DBA should be able to provide you with the data you need, isn’t it. To you I say, I wish that was the case, anyways.

To me this is the sort of thing that I like to spend my free time on 😎, so I spent an hour or so, figuring how to do it πŸ±β€πŸ’». I knew that there is a nice web browser automation tool called Selenium, but I had never used at that point.

With a bit of Pandas, I was able to get job done and I am very happy with the result, the script is accessible here.