The backend for WatCourses, a website to help University of Waterloo students plan their degrees. It provides a RESTful API for frontend's use. The website is located at watcourses.com.
Tech stack: Kotlin, Springboot, MySQL, Redis, protobuf
| Information | Source | Automatic Scraping |
|---|---|---|
| Course Information (description, requisites, etc.) | Undergraduate Studies Academic Calender (e.g. Math) | Y |
| Course schedule (enrolment, instructor, etc.) | UWaterloo API | Y |
| Like/Useful/Easy | UWFlow | Y |
| Degree requirements | Undergraduate Studies Academic Calender | N |
Requisites in natural language are parsed to AST (boolean expression) in order to check whether a schedule conforms to the respective degree and course requirements. Complex requirements are manually parsed and imported.
Example:
Prereq: ACTSC 363, STAT 330, (one of STAT 331, 371, 373); Actuarial Science or Mathematical Finance students only
is parsed into the following AST:
{"type":"AND","operands":[{"type":"OR","operands":[{"type":"HAS_LABEL","operands":[],"data":"Mathematical Finance"},{"type":"HAS_LABEL","operands":[],"data":"Actuarial Science"}],"data":null},{"type":"HAS_COURSE","operands":[],"data":"ACTSC 363"},{"type":"HAS_COURSE","operands":[],"data":"STAT 330"},{"type":"OR","operands":[{"type":"HAS_COURSE","operands":[],"data":"STAT 331"},{"type":"HAS_COURSE","operands":[],"data":"STAT 371"},{"type":"HAS_COURSE","operands":[],"data":"STAT 373"}],"data":null}],"data":null}which translates into ([Mathematical Finance] || [Actuarial Science]) && ACTSC 363 && STAT 330 && (STAT 331 || STAT 371 || STAT 373) (This boolean expression can also be parsed back into the AST).
Note that grades requirements are currently ignored because of privacy concerns (We do not collect or store your grades!)
Degree requirements are manually compiled for each degree. See SE.toml for an example.
You need to have MySQL (tested with MySQL 8.0) and Redis installed and change the configuration in application.properties.
Run /admin/scraping/start-courses to scrape courses from UWaterloo websites.
Note that access control for admin endpoints are not implemented yet; therefore, it is recommended that you block /admin from public access for now.
location /admin/ { return 403; }This program is licensed under AGPLv3.