An idea which would reduce small calculations.How to implement it??

[nikhil]

hii all,
I have an idea & like to see it in action.

I am currently in my 2nd year of Graduation. We get our semester marks on our college website.
We have around 7 subjects and so 7 rows on the results page.I have just cropped the pic to 4 rows here.

The thing is TOTAL of all the subjects & PERCENTAGE aren't displayed on the page .We need to open a calculator on our PC and then manually type in the marks to add them and get our grand total and calculate the percentage.

MY IDEA
I would like to reduce the trouble in that some what tedious task.
So, I thought of making something which would get the student his total marks & percentage in a single click without such manual entry work.
I'd like to design a plugin or an app (i'm not sure how to address that problem).

MY QUESTION
I found some ways of doing this:
1)Scanning the source code of the page & find the marks.
2)By a plugin or app.
(I'm not sure how to do it!)

I would like a window to popup on the page by a single click & that would display the TOTAL MARKS & PERCENTAGE.


How can that be solved?? A plugin or anything??
People access the site from their PC as well as MOBILE PHONES .So something which is compatible for both devices is good i feel !!! What do u say??Then how to achieve that ??

Another thing I noticed is that upon selecting the marks from the results table, even the subject names are also getting selected , so how to seperate the marks from selected text.(In case if we need to select text in solving the problem).

I just want to get my hands wet before I plunge into the fastlane business, so I'm interested in putting this idea into action.I would love to make some revenue out of it.(Doesn't mind even if it wouldn't).
My college has around 3000+ students , so quite a good number of students get to use it.

I'm doing a major in Computer Science , and would love to biuld it on my own.i know some c,c++,java ,some html/css as of now.I'm interested in learning new things as well to get this done!

Thanks for reading this!
I need your help in letting this happen.

 

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[rblitz]

Hi,

basically there are multiple options coming to my mind in order to solve your problem.

You can develop some sort of browser addon, a standalone app or a "web app".

If you're developing a browser addon you need to choose a browser or develop it for multiple browsers. So thats something you need to keep in mind. To provide a mobile solution you also need a different strategy, because a browser plugin wouldn't work for that.

An app has the disadvantage that you need to target multiple mobile operating systems, each one with there own framework or using a "container" like phonegap.
You also need to take care of your desktop users.

I think the "standalone web app" solution is the easiest to develop, because you don't need to implement different solutions for various devices.
Basically you set up a web page with some scripting behind it. For the html and css you can use some "mobile first" frameworks like twitter bootstrap
to keep away the struggle with different viewport sizes etc.

In your scripts you need to extract the data from your school site.

The disadvantage with all those solutions will be that your solution is broken, if the layout of the school page changes, because you need to rely on it, in order to get the data.
But I think thats not a big deal, because schools tend to be lazy and do not change their websites very often.

Some ideas about the scripting on your website:
I'm assuming that you need to have an account on your school site and be logged in, in order to view your semester marks.
So on your site you need to provide some sort of login form, where everyone put in there credentials for the school site.
After they provided you with the credentials you need to pass the details to the school site and fetch the page with the semester marks.
Then you traverse the structure of the semster mark site and extract the desired data from the table.
At the end you list the calculated sums etc. on your page.

To explore the structure of the school site you can take a look at Firebug, if you're using firefox or at the chrome developer tools.

Sorry for my english. It's been the first time since a few month writing in english.

 

[smarty]

It should be pretty easy to create a PHP script that calculates that. Few weeks ago my mother who is a teacher had to calculate some marks & averages for many classes which would take at least 1 day to do. So i sat down for 1 hour and built a simple script to do all the complicated calculations. You can see it here http://rego.pw/studentmarks nothing fancy. Not sure if the translation from my language to English is correct, but just to give you the idea. We had to enter names & marks manually though because the marks were on paper, not online, but a similar tool that scrapes all the data from the site shouldn't take more than 1-2 hours to build.
I would do that for you if I were't in the middle of work building a URL shortener website which I can't interrupt because I know if I start to get distracted, it's very hard to ignite that inspiration & consistency to work on it soon again
Good luck.

 

[nikhil]

Hi,

basically there are multiple options coming to my mind in order to solve your problem.

You can develop some sort of browser addon, a standalone app or a "web app".

If you're developing a browser addon you need to choose a browser or develop it for multiple browsers. So thats something you need to keep in mind. To provide a mobile solution you also need a different strategy, because a browser plugin wouldn't work for that.

An app has the disadvantage that you need to target multiple mobile operating systems, each one with there own framework or using a "container" like phonegap.
You also need to take care of your desktop users.

I think the "standalone web app" solution is the easiest to develop, because you don't need to implement different solutions for various devices.
Basically you set up a web page with some scripting behind it. For the html and css you can use some "mobile first" frameworks like twitter bootstrap
to keep away the struggle with different viewport sizes etc.

In your scripts you need to extract the data from your school site.

The disadvantage with all those solutions will be that your solution is broken, if the layout of the school page changes, because you need to rely on it, in order to get the data.
But I think thats not a big deal, because schools tend to be lazy and do not change their websites very often.

Some ideas about the scripting on your website:
I'm assuming that you need to have an account on your school site and be logged in, in order to view your semester marks.
So on your site you need to provide some sort of login form, where everyone put in there credentials for the school site.
After they provided you with the credentials you need to pass the details to the school site and fetch the page with the semester marks.
Then you traverse the structure of the semster mark site and extract the desired data from the table.
At the end you list the calculated sums etc. on your page.

To explore the structure of the school site you can take a look at Firebug, if you're using firefox or at the chrome developer tools.

Sorry for my english. It's been the first time since a few month writing in english.

Thanks a ton buddy!!!!
Thats invaluable. I will start to work on it!!

 

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[nikhil]

It should be pretty easy to create a PHP script that calculates that. Few weeks ago my mother who is a teacher had to calculate some marks & averages for many classes which would take at least 1 day to do. So i sat down for 1 hour and built a simple script to do all the complicated calculations. You can see it here http://rego.pw/studentmarks nothing fancy. Not sure if the translation from my language to English is correct, but just to give you the idea. We had to enter names & marks manually though because the marks were on paper, not online, but a similar tool that scrapes all the data from the site shouldn't take more than 1-2 hours to build.
I would do that for you if I were't in the middle of work building a URL shortener website which I can't interrupt because I know if I start to get distracted, it's very hard to ignite that inspiration & consistency to work on it soon again
Good luck.

Thanks dude,
thats somewhat similar to what I have to build.
I'll start building it.