Votr

Votr is an alternative frontend providing easier access to AIS2, the academic information system used at many universities in Slovakia. If you are a student of Comenius University, you can try Votr at https://votr.uniba.sk. If you need help, write to us at fmfi-svt@googlegroups.com. If you're interested in the development of Votr, read on.

AIS2 doesn't have an official API, so Votr primarily uses web scraping. The AIS2 servers think they're talking to a real user with a real web browser pressing buttons and navigating the endless popup windows that form AIS2's user interface. But it is in fact Votr, sending simulated button presses and parsing AIS2's mangled tag soup.

Votr's code base consists of three layers that build on each other. Aisikl, the lowest layer, does the actual communication by sending HTTP requests with fake user actions and parsing the responses from WebUI (the framework AIS2 is based on). Fladgejt contains the business logic for various AIS2 tasks and knows where to find which buttons and tables. And Votrfront is the web app that Votr's users interact with.

Development setup

• You need Linux. (macOS or WSL1 or WSL2 might work too. Nobody tried it.)
• Optional step: Install uv.
• Optional step: Install Python 3. Note that on Debian/Ubuntu you should install it with sudo apt install python3-venv because they separated "venv" into its own package. Also note that you don't need a system-wide pip.
• Optional step: Install Node.js. Make sure it's a recent version. The official packages on Debian/Ubuntu are frequently very outdated, but you can try NodeSource, or per-user installation with nvm.
• Optional step: Install Yarn 1. Optional substep: Read how to install it per-user without sudo.
• Install Git.
• Download Votr source code using Git:

  git clone https://github.com/fmfi-svt/votr.git
  cd votr

• Download and set up dependencies:

  ./x install

  Rerun this every time you pull a new version of Votr, in case some dependencies were updated.
  Optional step: Add --uv=local, --nodejs=local and/or --yarn=local if you didn't install them system-wide, or if you just prefer to use an isolated local version. You may need to install curl. (Behind the scenes, this downloads Python binaries from python-build-standalone and official Node.js binaries from nodejs.org.)
• To start a local Votr server, open two terminals and run these commands:

  ./x serve --debug

  ./x yarn watch

Contributing to Votr

If you'd like to help improve Votr, please get in touch! E-mail us at fmfi-svt@googlegroups.com and we'll help you with anything you need -- whether it's choosing a task to work on, understanding Votr's code, implementing your changes, or sending a pull request on GitHub.

Developer documentation

Some documentation is on the wiki: https://github.com/fmfi-svt/votr/wiki

Some documentation is in docstrings in the source code. You could build it with Sphinx if you really wanted to read it in a browser.

Building documentation:

uv run --with sphinx,sphinx-rtd-theme make -C docs html