is this possible to track website that requires authorization?

[meduselchen]

hello dear bernaferrari,

i found your tool via reddit and wanted to thank you for this simple solution! Some sebsites I rely on require authorization before showing any content. For example I have to enter my student number or log in with my student account before i can see exam result online. Is there a way do this with your app? Or maybe there is a workaround?

Thank you for your time!

[bernaferrari]

No, this is one of the weak points from the app. In order to make things simple, fast and battery efficient, this feature was dropped.

I have no idea how it would be possible to implement it. There is another app which saves as a macro all steps the user took to log in, and then replicates each and every time it needs to check for a change. Needless to say, this is slow, eats a lot of data and really not efficient. If you know anything better or have a better idea, let me know.

[cioccarellia]

Hold on a minute.

Let's say that no websites anymore uses GET requests for usernames and passwords, so this little hack is not available anymore to authenticate.

If you go, let's say, on Instagram, on GitHub, on your school electronic diary, and you log in, the next times you will have your account already added for you because its token/credentials are stored in the device cookies.
This mechanism has a custom implementation for every different website, but the guidelines are those ones.

Theoretically, it is possible to manipulate the headers of a request to implement the authentication method needed to access for example, at your feed, at your latest marks, at every personal content you may want to see.

So, my idea would be, isn't it possible to let the user manipulate with more precision a single website and give him the ability to analyze the page he wants to add and to make it work by himself?

I know that it sounds complicated and the main problem is user knowledge, because he would have to deal with HTTP headers and other temporal space continuum related stuff, but in my mind it would be great, and also unique.

I don't know if all of this is something that we can think of implementing for the technical difficulties also, but it would make this app 10 times better.

[bernaferrari]

I am currently without time until the next month, but this seems like a great idea.. It should, however, take a lot of work, be really hard to test, a lot of weird case scenarios might show up.

The request call is currently really simple, feel free to play with it by adding those headers/passwords on custom websites!

ChangeDetection/app/src/main/java/com/bernaferrari/changedetection/WorkerHelper.kt

Line 51 in 345830e

val response = client.newCall(request).execute()

[cioccarellia]

Ok, I'm imagining how it would look like, we need to add more data to the Site class, it can be a good start point, then we have to think about the interface and the actual things that we want our user able to edit.
I'll try to study the actual implementation and make a scheme of the new one

[bernaferrari]

Yeah, but a first starting point would be making a test or modifying the current code to make sure the login functionality works before modifying everything else.

…

On Wed, Oct 31, 2018, 04:07 Andrea Cioccarelli ***@***.***> wrote: Ok, I'm imagining how it would look like, we need to add more data to the Site class, it can be a good start point, then we have to think about the interface and the actual things that we want our user able to edit. I'll try to study the actual implementation and make a scheme of the new one — You are receiving this because you modified the open/close state. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#17 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAVblYuImj-g9IZamrsf7Xgbfb8U2Mboks5uqUwqgaJpZM4VvWxS> .

[9034725985]

I think basic http auth is standard and will be easier to implement and test. We could start there.

[bernaferrari]

Soon! Hopefully on the next big update, which is going to be the biggest ever (as long as everything keeps working)!

[kojid0]

any news on this issue? :)

[bernaferrari]

Hmmm.. So.. I'm halfway through it. I know it is taking longer than expected. Reason is I graduated in January and I'm enjoying the vacation. In the past two months, for example I traveled 1 week, got sick for 2, and there were Google i/o and Wwdc. Also, most of I'm doing now is UI development - the backend part is hopefully ready already. UI presents a few challenges: there is motion layout which is going to improve xml layouts, but it is not stable. There is compose UI which is going to deprecate system view, but it is in pre-alpha. There are material components, which.. Guess what.. Are also not stable and I had a few issues with them that I already reported and I'm waiting for the fix - for example, you can't open the input url and scroll because the screen gets weird. And finally, there is viewbinding which is going to help make layouts that will never crash, but it is not enabled for now. So I'm getting some time for myself while also waiting for any of these to stabilize.

[kojid0]

Hmmm.. So.. I'm halfway through it. I know it is taking longer than expected. Reason is I graduated in January and I'm enjoying the vacation. In the past two months, for example I traveled 1 week, got sick for 2, and there were Google i/o and Wwdc. Also, most of I'm doing now is UI development - the backend part is hopefully ready already. UI presents a few challenges: there is motion layout which is going to improve xml layouts, but it is not stable. There is compose UI which is going to deprecate system view, but it is in pre-alpha. There are material components, which.. Guess what.. Are also not stable and I had a few issues with them that I already reported and I'm waiting for the fix - for example, you can't open the input url and scroll because the screen gets weird. And finally, there is viewbinding which is going to help make layouts that will never crash, but it is not enabled for now. So I'm getting some time for myself while also waiting for any of these to stabilize.

Thank you for your reply. It's okay that things are not done yet, take your time, you're doing an awesome job! :)