LawNet Reading List Downloader - LRLD (macOS version)

A macOS application that automatically downloads cases in your reading lists from LawNet. The latest release can be found here. For the Windows version, please proceed to the Microsoft Store.

Use of the LRLD shall be subject to approval as may be required by the universities' administrators.

Presently, only Singapore Management University (SMU) accounts are supported. In the future, support may be extended to National University of Singapore (NUS) accounts.

Start screen	Downloading cases

Built by the law students from SMU: Gabriel Tan, Ng Jun Xuan, Wan Ding Yao

Development

Prerequisites for compiling

1. Make sure the dependencies in requirements.txt are installed and you have Python 3.6 or higher. The dependencies should be installed in a virtual environment e.g. using virtualenv.
2. Install PySide2==5.9 with python -m pip install --index-url=http://download.qt.io/snapshots/ci/pyside/5.9/latest pyside2 --trusted-host download.qt.io

Running the app without compiling

Run mainapp.py in your terminal

Compilation instructions

In the project directory, run:

pyi-makespec mainapp.py --onefile --windowed

This will generate a mainapp.spec file in your project directory which provides compilation instructions to PyInstaller.

For the app to have its own name and icon, also make sure mainapp.spec contains the following:

app = BUNDLE(exe,
             name='LawNet Reading List Downloader (LRLD).app',
             icon='icon.icns',
             bundle_identifier=None,
             info_plist={'NSPrincipalClass':'NSApplication',
                         'NSHighResolutionCapable': 'True'}
            )

Next, go into your virtualenv folder and find the site-packages directory. Make the following 2 changes within site-packages:

1. In the pdfminer folder, open pdfdocument.py and replace all mentions of Crypto to Cryptodome.
2. In the xhtml2pdf folder, open tags.py and replace from reportlab.graphics.barcode import createBarcodeDrawing with

try:
    from reportlab.graphics.barcode import createBarcodeDrawing
except:
    pass

Finally, go back to the project directory and run:

pyinstaller mainapp.spec

The binaries will be located in the dist folder.

Testing

Testing is done using the PyTest framework. VCR.py is used to save the http responses, to minimise hits to the LawNet servers. On the first testing run, a folder cassettes will be created inside the tests folder. Delete this folder if you want the tests to make real requests to the LawNet servers.

1. Make sure to install the testing dependencies as provided inside requirements.txt.
2. Create a file credentials.py inside the tests folder. This file should contain 2 dicts called login and false_login. Each dict should contain 2 keys username and password. login dict should contain correct credentials, while false_login should contain fake credentials.
3. Run the tests from the project root with python -m pytest tests.

SHA hashes

The tests use SHA 256 to compare the downloaded files. Helper methods are provided inside tests/sha_helpers.py to generate and write the sha to a file.