Hidden Temple Course Data Web API
I’m making a new app for the GenEd department to help students find GenEd courses that interest them. Before I could even start writing code I was at a major roadblock: I couldn’t find a way to get complete course info besides manually entering each course. That was, of course, until the discovery of Temple’s hidden (unadvertised?) web service.
bulletin.temple.edu hosts a cgi script: http://bulletin.temple.edu/ribbit/index.cgi that it sends AJAX calls to for tooltips in the course description page:
We can see in the inspector that the AJAX call takes 2 parameters: page and code.
The URL encoded string looks like this:
http://bulletin.temple.edu/ribbit/index.cgi?page=getcourse.rjs&code=MIS%202101
So, we can simply head to terminal and fire up curl to get some course descriptions:
$ curl http://bulletin.temple.edu/ribbit/index.cgi?page=getcourse.rjs&code=MIS%202101
Unfortunately there’s no cross-origin support so you can’t replicate a solely client-side course search but you can get course info with a single line in PHP: echo file_get_contents(“http://bulletin.temple.edu/ribbit/index.cgi?page=getcourse.rjs&code=MIS%202101“);
Output:
Credit for the discovery of the CGI script goes to Temple Directory/IT Infrastructure guru Sam Yelman
For complete API documentation see https://github.com/betheluniversity/cascade/files/170046/CourseLeaf.-.Data.Access.APIs.pdf