My family had the dream of going to Disney for my sister in law birthday in April and after coordinating the house, plane tickets, multiple families, and tickets we had a problem. The park tickets were not purchased at the exact same moment and some of the family was not able to reserve their park! How could we fix this so the family can go to the park together?
The Calendar
We could do the following…
- Manually Click Dates
- Check Available Parks
- Repeat above…forever…hoping to get lucky
This clearly is not something we can do…there must be a way to dig deeper and automate the checking.
Finding The Data
Lets look to see how the calendar actually works.
- Inspect page load via developer tools
- Check XHR to see if there are any api requests….
- Looking through the requests we see
calendar
The API
If you view the request in a new window we get some nicely formatted json and the url is human readable.
https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/availability-calendar/api/calendar?segment=tickets&startDate=2021-04-05&endDate=2021-04-30
Thankful we see that the query string has a lot of helpful parameters
startDateendDatesegment
Decoding Response
Now that we discovered the format of the request next we need to understand the response.
[
{
"date": "2021-04-17",
"availability": "none",
"parks": []
},
{
"date": "2021-04-18",
"availability": "partial",
"parks": [
"80007838"
]
},
{
"date": "2021-04-19",
"availability": "partial",
"parks": [
"80007838"
]
},
{
"date": "2021-04-20",
"availability": "partial",
"parks": [
"80007823",
"80007838"
]
}
]
The good news the json response is fairly straight forward except for some magic numbers.
dateavailabilityparkslist of parks that are availableEpcot 80007838Animal Kingdom 80007823Magic Kingdom 80007944Hollywood Studios 80007998
We were able to reverse engineer the above magic numbers by clicking around the calendar and recording which numbers showed up compared to what was displayed on the screen.
NodeJs
Now that we had an api, understood the request and response lets use turn this into a small program using NodeJs and 🔗axios. Our program will need to do the following.
- Request Data from the API
- Parse the response
- If availability do…….something.
Once we put this all together we ended up with the following.
const axios = require("axios");
let url =
"https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/availability-calendar/api/calendar?segment=tickets&startDate=2021-04-17&endDate=2021-04-17";
(async () => {
try {
const response = await axios.get(url);
var epcot = "80007838";
var animalKingdom = "80007823";
var magicKingdom = "80007944";
var hollywood = "80007998";
var message = "";
var alert = false;
response.data.forEach((date) => {
message += `Date: ${date.date} | Parks:`;
var parkNames = [];
date.parks.forEach((park) => {
if (park === epcot) {
parkNames.push("Epcot");
}
if (park === animalKingdom) {
parkNames.push("Animal Kingdom");
}
if (park === magicKingdom) {
alert = true;
parkNames.push("Magic Kingdom");
}
if (park === hollywood) {
parkNames.push("Hollywood");
}
});
message += `${parkNames.join()} \n`;
});
if (alert) {
//send alert
}
} catch (error) {
console.log(error.response.body);
}
})();
As you can see from the above we parsed the response and then captured the parks that are available and only trigger an alert for Magic Kingdom as that was the park the family wanted to go to on the day 2021-04-17
Automation
Now that we had a node program we needed to run this on a schedule to automagically check ever so often to see if any new parks open up. We could run via cron or similar scheduling tools, manually run it, or a server-less approach.
I decided to go with pipedream as it ticked all the boxes.
Stop writing boilerplate code, struggling with authentication and managing infrastructure. Start connecting APIs with code-level control when you need it — and no code when you don’t.
Convert to Workflow
It was fairly straightforward to convert the NodeJs program to a pipe dream workflow as it had node support at its core which made the migration easy.
Steps
The first thing we needed to do is define a few steps to help flow together what has to happen at each execution along the way.
Dates
We had a step for date that just returns the date we want to check for the calendar checking step.
async (event, steps) => {
return {
date: "2021-04-17"
}
}
Check API
As you can see this is a fairly easy migration but a few changes happened to make it work in pipedream
- pass in the
datevia thestepsobjectsteps.date_to_check.$return_value.date; - return an object so it can be used in future steps
return {
alert: alert,
message: message
};
async (event, steps) => {
const axios = require("axios");
let date = steps.date_to_check.$return_value.date;
let url =
`https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/availability-calendar/api/calendar?segment=tickets&startDate=${date}&endDate=${date}`;
try {
const response = await axios.get(url);
var epcot = "80007838";
var animalKingdom = "80007823";
var magicKingdom = "80007944";
var hollywood = "80007998";
var message = "";
var alert = false;
response.data.forEach((date) => {
message += `Date: ${date.date} | Parks:`;
var parkNames = [];
date.parks.forEach((park) => {
if (park === epcot) {
parkNames.push("Epcot");
}
if (park === animalKingdom) {
parkNames.push("Animal Kingdom");
}
if (park === magicKingdom) {
alert = true;
parkNames.push("Magic Kingdom");
}
if (park === hollywood) {
parkNames.push("Hollywood");
}
});
message += `${parkNames.join()} \n`;
});
return {
alert: alert,
message: message
};
} catch (error) {
console.log(error.response.body);
}
}
As we said above we want to do something this if the alert is triggered which in this workflow happens to be an email. My favorite zero friction email service happens to be sendgrid and good news is pipedream has a built in connector to send grid.
async (event, steps, params, auths) => {
const axios = require('axios')
if (steps.check_disney_calendar.$return_value.alert) {
return await require("@pipedreamhq/platform").axios(this, {
url: `https://api.sendgrid.com/v3/mail/send`,
headers: {
Authorization: `Bearer ${auths.sendgrid.api_key}`,
},
method: 'POST',
data: {
"personalizations": [{
"to": [{
"email": params.to_email,
"name": params.to_name
}],
"subject": params.subject
}],
"from": {
"email": params.from_email,
"name": params.from_name
},
"reply_to": {
"email": params.reply_to_email,
"name": params.reply_to_name
},
"content": [{
"type": params.type,
"value": params.value
}]
}
})
}
}
we modified the built in template slightly to only send the email if steps.check_disney_calendar.$return_value.alert is actually true
Now that we have all of these in place it is time to try it out by finding a date that has availability and use that in the date step.
Testing It Out
We set the workflow to trigger every 10 minutes and as soon as we hit the right condition we got the above email.
Time To Wait…Did it work?
Yes
It actually did work we triggered the check every 10 minutes and as soon as I got the email I resorted to the manual flow of contacting every family member. I could have easily used twilio to make a phone call, maybe that will be in the next iteration.
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