Project Details
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DocFlow Automator
Project description
Automating the portal nobody built an API for
The Challenge
A great deal of institutional work happens inside web portals that have no API: a document is generated, uploaded, keyed into a form and filed by hand, every time. It is slow, it is error-prone in exactly the way repetition makes things error-prone, and the person doing it has a degree.
Automating somebody else's web portal means accepting that it will change without warning and is not yours to fix. The automation has to fail loudly and safely rather than half-completing a submission, because a partially filed document is worse than an unfiled one.
The Solution
Drive the real interface with a real browser rather than reverse-engineering undocumented endpoints: generate or process the document, then perform the steps a person would perform, with checkpoints that verify the state before continuing. Where the portal's markup shifts, the failure is caught at the checkpoint rather than at submission.
Skills and deliverables
Features delivered
The hard part
Building for a target that moves. Every selector is a liability, so the design keeps them in one place, checks the page's actual state before acting, and treats every step as something that can be false.
The Impact
Deployed and working against a real university portal for document submission, with the generation and processing pipeline beside it.
