Profiles entered into the Profile Editor for staff and faculty can now be exported for consumption into your dynamic web sites.
How does this process work?
Simply send web requests to the below URL with the NetID of the staff or faculty.
https://directory.illinois.edu/internalProfile/{netid}
Web Services will either hand back the HTML profile for the person in question or a 404 error (page not found). This profile will be the same content found when viewing the person's profile on the campus web directory excluding the skin and search box.
The NetID that is passed cannot contain wild cards. We also ask that you pull the data dynamically. Don't pull every profile for your college each and every day. If you can please cache the profiles to save on web requests.
If we receive an unreasonable number of requests at any given time then we will throttle it by returning a 503 error. This is to protect the LDAP server.
All elements are identified by a "data-type" attribute. Categories also have a “data-name” attribute. Emails are encoded by JavaScript to prevent harvesting so this code could be used as is (after being styled of course).
How to register for this service?
When sending web requests to this URL you will only receive the (default) profile for Lance Campbell. To see the proper profile simply fill out the Contact Us link at the top of the Webtools Toolbox with the below information:
1) The IP addresses of servers that will access this service.
2) One or more NetIDs of those people that will be admins helping people with the Profile Editor for your unit/college.
3) Either provide a link to a contact us form or an email address that we will use when people in your unit press the "Contact us" link within the Profile Editor.
By choosing to consume our profiles your IT support staff will take responsibility for answering questions regarding the use of this service.
Why export only HTML?
The export process only allows for HTML to be exported. We did this for a couple of reasons:
1) Most users of this data don't want to redesign the presentation of the data. They can just plug the HTML into their CMS/portal and apply a skin and CSS styling.
2) XML and Jason require particular data structures. If we need to modify the process then it will break software that is pulling in the current data. We then have to go through extensive code update procedures to make sure every group is aware of upcoming changes.
3) Most programming languages now allow for the processing of HTML tags. You can easily extract the necessary data via the HTML attributes. Because we are not data modeling each and every field entered by users this is a much simpler approach.