Appointment finder for GNIB/VISA (Ireland)

Find the blog for this project at harshp.com.

There is a Facebook bot by the name @GVisaBot with a Facebook Page. The bot replies with the available appointments.

There is a heroku webapp live at https://gnibappt.herokuapp.com/ which essentially runs the python script in the background and displays the results in a browser.

There are two scripts, python and bash+python. Since python is installed pretty much by default everywhere (you suck Windows), that one is more nice. The bash one pulls the request using curl and then parses the json using python.

The chrome extension can be loaded using developer tools -> unpacked extension. It should show a calendar icon on the bar. Clicking it will open a popup with a quick link to the appointment booking site. Visiting the appointment page will trigger the extension, and it shows a bar on top with four options:

• Check Appointments - will show a popup with available appointments
• Load Data - will load stored form data from browser storage
• Save Data - will save current form data
• Ask appointment - once the form is filled, this will open the closest appointment to today

The ideal workflow is to save the form at some time (fill it completely) and then use the extension to check whether there are any appointments available. If there are, click load data, and the form should be filled completely. Then you can click on ask appointment and select one that suits.

At a basic level, it works using AJAX requests. There is another file - query.html that contains the jQuery code to pull the appointments from within the browser. For it to work, CORS needs to be disabled. If not, you can copy the jQuery bits and execute them in the console of the GNIB appointments page. Beats entering the form information.

The GNIB (Ireland) system uses an online application form to retrieve appointments, for which, one must first fill out a rather long form to retrieve the available appointments. If there are no appointments available, and this is the most likely scenario, well, tough luck. The next time, fill out the entire form again and check if there are any appointments.

Irritated by this procedure, and armed with a few crude skills around websites and scripting, I created this script to pull the available appointment dates. This script works as it is (for me) with the following caveats:

• The visa type is Study
• The sub-type is PhD (this does not matter currently)

The way this works is that the webpage sends some data based on the fields in the form to a URI to get the available response. This can be retrieved using the form.onSubmit field (basically what happens when you click submit) and from there finding the javascript function that handles the particular use case.

In this case, it is allowLook4App specified on line 582 for button id=btLook4App. This function is declared in the file https://burghquayregistrationoffice.inis.gov.ie/Website/AMSREG/AMSRegWeb.nsf/AppForm.js. It calls get4DateAvailability() which does the actual request to get the appointment dates.

Inside this function are the following lines:

var sCat = "&cat=" + $('#Category').val();
var sSCat = "&sbcat=All" //+ $('#SubCategory').val();
var sTyp = "&typ=" + $('#ConfirmGNIB').val();

These get the category and the type of appointment. In this case, they can be substituted with Study and Renewal. The subtype is always All. The datastring is constructed as var dataThis = sCat + sSCat + sTyp which is category + subcategory + type. This is then sent as a GET request to the url "/" + stPath + "/(getApps4DTAvailability)?openpage" where stPath is 'Website/AMSREG/AMSRegWeb.nsf'.

The response from this is then checked for errors using data.errors. If there are no appointments, there will be a non-null or defined key data.empty. If there are appointments, they will be of the form:

data = {
    slots: [
        {
            id: 'string',
            time: 'string'
        }
    ]
}

The server (or browser, I'm never sure) is ficky about CORS, which is why the requests need Access-Control and Origin headers.

In the scripts, I've used the get appointments nearest to today since that is more useful (to me) and is defined in getEarliestApps() with a differnt URI as "/" + stPath + "/(getAppsNear)?openpage".

The method for visa appointments is also quite similar. First, the dates are requested, and then the appointments for each date are requested.