Attendance Tracker for Stuy CS Dojo

The Attendance Tracker is a Python Flask application to upload, store, and pull attendance logs from Google Spreadsheets to and from either CSV files or one-line texts lines.

This Flask Application is meant to be used in line with the CS Dojo Scanner application, but it can also be called manually.

Installing Dependencies

The Attendance Tracker is built on Python 2.7.6 and requires Flask and the Google API.

$ sudo apt-get install python-dev libssl-dev libffi-dev
$ pip install --upgrade flask google-api-python-client gspread PyOpenSSL

For Development

• https://github.com/burnash/gspread
• http://gspread.readthedocs.org/en/latest/oauth2.html

If you are creating your own user for GSpread via the Google Developer Console, be sure to SHARE the spreadsheet with your Service account, as per: burnash/gspread#226

Running

Create admin accounts

To run the application, you must first create admin credentials for the app. Do this via console.py:

$ python console.py
>> add username password
>> list
[A LIST WILL APPEAR HERE]
>> exit

Google Credentials

Next, you must obtain a JSON file for a Google API Service account. See the links provided in the 'For Development' section to learn how. Save the JSON file in the SAME folder as app.py (i.e. the project root folder) as gcreds.json. The name MUST be gcreds.json.

Change the Spreadsheet title

In utils/project_constants.py, you will see that the last line contains the name of the spreadsheet:

STUYCS_DOJO_ATTENDANCE_SHEET_NAME = "cs_dojo_attendance_2015-2016"

This file functions as a config file for the application. Change the STUYCS_DOJO_ATTENDANCE_SHEET_NAME variable to a string, containing the name of the Spreadsheet you wish to access.

Starting up the application

To run the application, simply start the server using:

$ python app.py

For more run options, run python app.py -h

Contacting the Server via CURL

You can contact the server via a web browser, wget request, or curl request as shown below:

$ curl -s -X GET "${SERVER_ADDR}?username=${ADMIN_NAME}&pword=${ADMIN_PWORD}&osis=${barcode}&date=${DATE}"

The 'osis' is a New York City school ID. For users not implementing this app for NYC schools, you can browse through the source to change the variable name to something else, such as data.

Possible responses:

• OK - Server executed successfuly
• no_creds - gcreds.json was not found or was not loaded successfully
• bad_login - The ${ADMIN_NAME} and ${ADMIN_PWORD} variables were not recognized. Add them via console.py
• no_osis - No data was sent to the server. Nothing to execute.

Troubleshooting

I ran into an issue where a valid gcreds.json was not being authorized. It turned out the issue is that the machine running the server must maintain proper system time. On Linux systems, you can update the system time via:

$ sudo ntpdate time.nist.gov