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Illinois JobsLink Project

Build Illinois Jobslink scraper, API, and front end.

This project was an attempt to build an Illinois Joblinks scraper and API to index the jobs. This was built such that important public job listing data could be accessible and utilized. This is aimed towards a more technically savvy audience who are familiar with HTTP requests, JSON, and general API protocol.

Setup

You will require the necessary python modules to run these scripts. Be sure to install the modules included in requirements.txt.

You will also need to setup your own account on https://illinoisjoblink.illinois.gov/ada/r/ so that this tool is able to access all of the data. Beware, the process is cumbersome.

Furthermore, you MUST include your username and password in settings.py so that the scraper is able to effectively login and grab data.

Scrape

The scraping part of this project is found within init_scrape.py. You can run the intial scrape (which scrapes ALL of the jobs) with the following:

python init_scrape.py

This should take a while as it must grab on the order of ~10^4 job listings and all of their associated data. The results of the scrape are stored within a sqlite databse called listings.db. This database can be accessed using the sqlite client and can be, of course, interacted with using SQL. Those familiar with databases can use this directly to tailor this data for their specific uses.

API

We have included a module to setup an API so that others may access the data in the database using HTTP requests. This can be run using the following

python api.py

Query strings can be used to access the data. The endpoints are

  • /jobs - Lists the job listings
  • /help - Lists the possible filters you may use

You may filter the job listings using query strings, such as http://127.0.0.1:5000/jobs?name=ferret&id=007. Be sure to check the names of the parameters and what values are able to be taken. It is useful to refer to https://illinoisjoblink.illinois.gov/ada/r/search/jobs to see what valid entries are for fields.

OAuth

We have attempted to support integration with Google Fusion Tables in an effort to use Derek Eder Searcheable Map Template. However, due to the sheer number of job listings, it is not feasible to map all listings in any sensible manner. Furthermore, there exist Google restrictions that hinder our utilization of these tools. oauth.py contains our attempts and currently is able to write all of the data to a Fusion Table, where perhaps some may find it useful to host for sharing of the data. You will need to update settings.py accordingly with the correct FusionTableId. This app will also require permission to your Google account so it may write to the target FusionTable.

You may also refer to our development notes/timeline below for both our development journey and greater insight into the inner mechanics.

Development Timeline & Misc. - NOTE: THIS IS NOT DESCRIPTIVE OF CURRENT WORKINGS - USED ONLY FOR DEV

Overview

  • Scrape the relevant information from https://illinoisjoblink.illinois.gov/ada/r/search/jobs. We will be using BeautifulSoup and Requests.

    • Scrape How To Apply, Education Level, Salary/Wages, Location
    • Python dictionaries, conditional and loop structures, HTTP methods, JSON.
    • Iron out authentication and login problems on Illinois Jobslink site.

  • Store in Google Fusion Tables and sqlite database

    • SQL queries helpful
    • Will need to solve OAuth2 troubles

  • Derek Eder's Searcheable Map Template will be used as the front end.

    • Used before in Network9 Project for CPS
    • Bootstrap, JS stuff.

  • Update Script that runs periodically (daily or weekly) and updates Google Fusion Tables and sqlite database.

    • Will live on Heroku

Teamwork

We will be using Git and GitHub for this project. To get started, fork the repository to your own account. Once forked, go to your repository and clone it to your local machine.

git clone /FORKED/REPO/URL

Make sure you make a new branch when you are implementing a new feature. Be sure to be working in the right branch when coding.

You will also need to make sure you set your upstream repository correctly. To do that do the following:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/uchicagotechteam/illinois-jobslink.git

Then you will need to create and pull the branches themselves, as follows:

git checkout -b init_scrape
git checkout init_scrape
git pull upstream init_scrape

git checkout -b api
git checkout api
git pull upstream api

You'll be ready to code now! Make sure you are in the right branch by using git checkout <BRANCH_NAME>.

Once you code, make sure you add your files and commit them. Push them to your forked repository when ready.

git add FILENAMES (or use -a {be careful!})
git commit -m "Insert commit message."
git push origin <BRANCH_NAME>

Once you're done with your branch, be sure to send a pull request so I can merge your code with the existing project.

Set Up

We will be using pip and virtualenv in this project. Make sure you have pip installed. If you downloaded Python via Anaconda, you are good to go. I'm not sure about other distributions.

To install virtualenv

pip install virtualenv

Once you've done this, cd into your project repo. Then run the following commands if you are on Windows.

virtualenv env
env/scripts/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

If you're on MacOS, you'll run something like the following:

virtualenv env
env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

This will create a virtual environment so that any development you do will not be affected by the global system variables. Also, you will download all of the packages from requirements.txt, so that the code will actually run. If you install any new packages for code you have written, make sure to put them into requirements.txt.

Team: Scrape

The init_scrape branch is the branch dedicated for the initial scrape. Our objectives/tasks for this branch are:

  • Login to https://illinoisjoblink.illinois.gov/ada/r/search/jobs

    So I made an account for this website as you can only get all of the information for each job posting by making an account. However, I have NOT yet figured out how to actually login with Python. There are some workarounds that we can try. This is kind of an advanced feature, and if you have a lot of experience, I'll be in touch.

  • Request https://illinoisjoblink.illinois.gov/ada/r/search/jobs (This is the FIRST page) and scrape it.

    Like we did on 12 OCT 2016, we are going to have to scrape the list of job postings on this page. If you inspect the page source and scroll down a TON to the job postings, you'll see HTML that looks like the following for ONE job posting:

    <dt>
  <a href="/ada/r/jobs/4324478">Insurance Sales Agent (4324478)</a>
  <div class="updated right">Last Updated: 2016-10-12</div>
  <!-- search score: 1.0 -->
</dt>
<dd>
  <div class="row">
      <div class="col_1">
          <b>Employer: </b>
          Combined Insurance
      </div>
      <div class="col_2">
          <b>Location: </b>
          <i>Belleville , IL</i>
      </div>
  </div>
  <div class="description"><p>Management Trainees needed for the Metro East Area. For those competitive individuals with a desire to achieve, come join a winning team. Offering insurance products including Disability, Accident &amp; Sickness, Whole Life, &amp; Medicare Supplement, Combined Insurance, established in 1922, is expanding its Management Trainee program. Opportunities available in two…</p></div>
</dd>

    Notice how for each job posting we have a <dt> and <dd> tag that is associated with the job. The <dt> tag points to the name of the job name as well as the url of the webpage of that job. The <dd> tag has descriptions and stuff.

  • Step through the url for each job posting and scrape the job page

    So we're going to have to get the urls, which are located in the <a> tag under the <dt> tag. If you look in init_scrape.py you'll see the following code (as of 12 OCT 2016, 8:30 PM):

    # Print the urls for each job listing.
  # Will need to implement stepping through these urls and scraping the
  # relevant data.
  listings = soup.find_all("dt")  # Finds all dt tags (elements in the list)
  for l in listings:
      # Finds the a tag, which will have the name and the url
      urls = l.find_all('a')
      for u in urls:
          job_url = u['href']  # The href part of the tag will have the url
          name = u.string  # The name will be in the string part of the a tag
          id_num = u.string[u.string.find('(') + 1:u.string.find(')')]

    So we've gotten the url for each job posting, and we need to step through the url and scrape that page. We can request the url as follows and set up a BeautifulSoup object for that page.

    r = requests.get("INSERT_JOB_URL_HERE")
job_soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content, "html.parser")

    We're going to step through the url because that page has more information than just the homepage of the website.

    We're going to scrape information like description, location, wages, etc.

  • Insert the scraped data into sqlite and Google Fusion Tables.

    I'll go over this in a session. We'll be going over SQL statements and sqlite. Don't worry about this right now.

    Fusion Tables is going to be difficult, but we'll figure it out.

  • Step through the ALL the pages of the search results.

    If you look at the bottom of https://illinoisjoblink.illinois.gov/ada/r/search/jobs, you'll see there are a LOT of result pages. We're going to have to step through each of these, scrape for all of the job urls, and THEN step through all of those job urls.

    But, wait, how are we going to go to next page? Python doesn't have a mouse to click Next Page, so what are we to do??

    https://illinoisjoblink.illinois.gov/ada/r/search/jobs?is_subsequent_search=false&page=2&refiners=%7B%7D&status=Active

    This is the url for the second webpage. Notice the very subtle page=2 in the url. So what we can do is iterate through by changing the number from page=2 to page=3 to get the third page. If we want the ith page, we would do 'page=' + str(i).

Team: Backend

@app.route('/callback') def callback(): flow = client.flow_from_clientsecrets( 'client_secret_911503641744-hn8pinmojgfi1n4poh2n8ssk48bu8idn.apps.googleusercontent.com.json', scope='https://www.googleapis.com/auth/fusiontables', redirect_uri='http://localhost:5000/callback')

flow.params['access_type'] = 'offline'

if 'code' not in request.args:
    auth_uri = flow.step1_get_authorize_url()
    return redirect(auth_uri)
else:
    auth_code = request.args.get('code')
    credentials = flow.step2_exchange(auth_code)
    session['credentials'] = credentials.to_json()
    return redirect(url_for('index'))


that you insert your own `client_secrets.json` file. MAKE SURE YOU DON'T PUSH THE JSON FILE TO GITHUB. THAT'S REALLY BAD! 

Also, make sure you make your own personal Fusion Table and in the following spot:

ft_service = build('fusiontables', 'v2', http_auth) ft_service.query().sql( sql="INSERT INTO 1WOu6DaHenRNNXIWHkNWjGf66sUCnfl5fLQHhHOwt (col0) VALUES ('TODO');").execute() tables = ft_service.table().list().execute() return json.dumps(tables)


you put in the `table_id` for your Fusion Table. Now make sure you have a column called `col0`, and this SQL statement will put a `TODO` value in that column!

This is the basis for how writing to Fusion Table will be. Instead of `TODO`, we will query our database and write whatever we get back into the Fusion Table. 

There are a few things we still need to figure out though. 
+ We will need to update old entries with either new information or deleting really old listings.
+ How do we set up the Flask framework so that we can automate the write on a daily or weekly basis? 
+ How do we get prolonged access to the user's data? There is something called a `refresh` token, but I haven't figured it out yet. 

+ Endpoints

Our data is stored in a `sqlite` database, which will be served via an API built on Flask. If we look in the `api` branch, there is `api.py` file that has all of the Flask code (well really basic stuff) in it. We can instantiate it as follows. (Make sure you have all of the correct packages installed i.e. `pip install requsts`, `pip install flask`, and other packages).

(env) PS D:\Projects\TechTeam\illinois-jobslink> python api.py

  • Restarting with stat
  • Debugger is active!
  • Debugger pin code: 115-448-509
  • Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)

This indicates that our server is running. We can then go to our favorite browser and type into the browser bar `http://127.0.0.1:5000/`. 

You should get an error at this point, because in `api.py` we haven't written what should be done when the `/` endpoint is called. BUT we do have `/jobs` endpoint defined. So we can type in `http://127.0.0.1:5000/jobs` and we should see something pop up! It should look something like this

{ "jobs": "" }


So far this is empty since we haven't actually returned any of the job listings, but it should eventually come back with a list of all the jobs that fit our parameters.

Jobs can be filtered via the url and a query string. If we type in

http://127.0.0.1:5000/jobs?name=ferret

we can filter all of the jobs with the name `ferret`. This won't actually work since we haven't written the code to actually do it. We can chain together parameters with the `&` character as follows

http://127.0.0.1:5000/jobs?name=ferret&id=007


So we will be using this paradigm. A user can filter what jobs they want by using this query string, and its our job to only grab the jobs in the database that fit the parameters. Some more info about [query strings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_string).

We will be servicing the requests through SQL statements, and you can find model code in `api.py` that does this. 

Another thing to think about is whether we want to add more endpoints or functionality so that users can ask for data in different and more complex ways. 

+ Update

We are going to have to solve how to update our database with new jobs and removing old jobs. We will be doing this with SQL statements again and probably periodically (daily or weekly?). [SQL](http://www.w3schools.com/sql/) commands and syntax.

## Team: Frontend

+ Searchable Map Template

We will be using [Derek Eder's Searcheable Map Template](http://derekeder.github.io/FusionTable-Map-Template/) for our mapping purposes. He has GREAT documentation so check his page out. 

We really have free range on how we want to design the map, so you guys have a lot of creative freedom.

+ Analytics

I think it might be cool to do some of our own analytics on this data. We can use R as well as Python with `matplotlib` and `pandas`.

You should start to think about what trends, relationships we want to look at and how we can describe these graphically.

+ D3

[D3](https://d3js.org/) is a REALLY cool visualization library written in JavaScript. I don't have much experience at all but I think we can make some cool looking graphics. This team will work with the Analytics team closely.

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Build Illinois Jobslink scraper, API, and front end.

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