Case study / UMS-Api
UMS-Api
UMS-Api converts a session-based university portal into a usable API. It manages ASP.NET authentication cookies, parses upstream HTML, and exposes structured endpoints for profile data, attendance, CGPA, placement access, and user search.
PythonFastAPIBeautifulSoupaiohttpPytestDocker
Request flow
Session-backed portal API
Clients call FastAPI endpoints, the service authenticates against ASP.NET portals, maintains cookies, parses HTML, and returns structured JSON.
01
Client
Student or integration consumer
02
FastAPI API
HTTP contract + docs
03
Session Manager
UMS and placement cookies
04
HTML Parser
BeautifulSoup extraction
05
JSON Output
Academic and placement data
Contributions
What was built
Implemented dual-portal authentication for both UMS and placement systems.
Exposed structured student and placement endpoints over an HTML-first upstream portal.
Added tests, Docker support, and developer-facing documentation.
Technical decisions
How the implementation was shaped
Explicit session recovery avoids full failure when a cookie expires mid-workflow.
FastAPI gives the project a documented contract instead of a script-only interface.
Docker and tests make a scraping-heavy integration easier to reproduce and maintain.
Challenges
Operational and engineering constraints
Working against a system that was never intended to be consumed as an API.
Maintaining resilience when upstream markup or session behavior changes.
Handling authenticated workflows safely over multiple portals.
Outcomes
Why the project matters
Turned repetitive student portal tasks into a reusable API surface.
Covered both academic and placement data paths.
Dual-portal auth, HTML parsing, and Docker support with tests.