dmarantz.com



Schedulator

For all those University of Waterloo students who go through the trouble of creating a graphical representation of their timetables, there's a program to do just that for you!

For other university students, if your schedule is displayed like the one in the sample below (ie. your school uses PeopleSoft's management system similar to UW's Quest), you may try to use the Schedulator.

The Schedulator service is provided as is, with no guarentees. While testing is done to ensure accuracy, I take no responsibility if there are classes or events missing from your created schedule.
If you notice a problem with your schedule, please let me know so that it can be fixed to benefit others. Note that TST, Distance Education, and PRJ entries are not displayed in your schedule at this time.

The Schedulator works by parsing the HTML file that is your schedule from Quest and creating an Excel document out of it. This was made using ASP.NET and the Excel 2003 COM.

This is brought to you by Daniel Marantz and Colin Dellow

Updates

December 12, 2005 - Updated instructions, since Quest was redone to use -way- too much javascript.
September 23, 2005 - ASP.net server comes back online.
August 15, 2005 - My ASP.net server which runs the Schedulator goes offine, and into storage.
May 3, 2005 - Tied the new Perl script and XML-enabled excel page generator together, and now we have an updated working Schedulator!
May 2, 2005 - Colin wrote Perl script to parse the uploaded html file off Quest and create XML.
May 1, 2005 - Decoupled the parsing and excel-generating components of the Schedulator. Made the excel-generating component accept XML data.
Aug 30, 2004 - Fixed parser to ignore timeblocks with dates (ie. TST and some SEMs) because they don't follow the convention
Aug 28, 2004 - Excel file generation completed
Aug 27, 2004 - Initial parsing of schedule HTML into objects works.
<-- HTML page


Excel File -->
More examples can be found on Colin's website
How to use it:
  1. Log onto Quest
  2. Go to the Academics section
  3. Click "View My Class Schedule"
  4. Select the term to which you want your schedule
  5. Now you should see your schedule, similar to the picture on the left above.
  6. In Firefox:
    1. Right click in the content section of the page (lower half)
    2. In the context menu, click "This Frame ->", then "View Frame Source"
    3. CTRL+A to select all the text
    4. Copy and paste it into a text document
    5. Save the file and get ready to upload that html file below.
    6. NOTE: Do Not 'Save Page As', it won't work because Quest is tricky. Try it and see what the saved page loads as if you want.
    In IE:
    1. Right Click in the content section of the page (lower half)
    2. In the context menu, click "View Source"
    3. Save the file and get ready to upload that html file below.
    If you have another browser, you can figure it out.
  7. Browse to the file you just saved below, and click Convert Schedule.

The Schedulator is running off a different server than this website. Please be patient while it loads.

If there's an error, it's probably because the file you uploaded was not the correct one. The goal is to upload the html for the schedule page. To verify that you have the correct file, open it up in notepad and scan it for a course code, or building number. That should make sure you have the right file. If there are still errors, feel free to email me the file you're trying to upload and I'll look at why it's crashing.