Re: importing bank statements

You'll probably get a better understanding of Fake's capabilities if 
you watch the 2 minute video demo at http://www.fakeapp.com/

The code is open source and I have just posted it to 
https://code.google.com/p/web-banking-assistant/

Currently (and by no means ideal) username and password is entered in 
the Private.js file for each supported bank. (A better solution will be 
needed soon.)

The real heart of the program is the JavaScript code. Currently I use 
Fake.app to load the bank's login web page, inject the JavaScript and 
loop through a series of pages. Fake could be replaced by any tool or 
library that can inject JavaScript into a web page. I am not familiar 
with Python's Mechanize module. Is JavaScript injection something it 
can do?

If a replacement for Fake can be found then yes, this code _could_ be 
made into a plugin for Moneydance.

I'm open to pretty much anything. I wrote the code in JavaScript 
because that was the easiest solution I have found so far. I use Fake 
because it too is the easiest solution I have found. I'm willing to 
change all of that especially if the change will help make it cross 
platform and/or a Moneydance plugin.

I welcome your thoughts and contributions.

-SteveL





On Sat, 21 May 2011 15:14:22 -0600, Matt&Katrina Funk wrote:
> Hi Steve,
> i'd love to collaborate as well. I'd be interested to know the following:
> 1) What functionality does the "fake" product provide
> 2) Is your code open source/a product you wish to sell?
> 3) How do you handle security (passwords etc...). Do you have to type
> the passwords in manually everytime?
> 4) Can you program be used as a plugin to moneydance?
> 
> What i had in mind was something like the following:
> 1) have an input file in which the user can specify the relevant fields
> for his specific bank site (i.e. login/passwd field, etc...)
> Here the problem is security as i would not want to store passwords
> (especially to bank accounts) in plain text files. Not sure how to deal
> with that yet but i am sure somebody has done something like it before.
> 2) Then i was going to simulate the browser via the mechanize module in
> python.
> 
> matt
> 
> 
> On 5/19/2011 10:48 AM, Rob Lund wrote:
>> Sounds like a great project, Steve!  I'd be happy to contribute, though I'm
>> no JS developer.
>> 
>> On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 10:00 AM, 
>> <[email protected]>wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> I have been working on a solution off and on (more off than on) for a
>>> few years now. There are a few different approaches to take.
>>> 
>>> 1. Automate your browser
>>> 2. Write a cURL script
>>> 3. Write a program in your favorite computer language
>>> 
>>> Writing a program in your favorite computer language is a boatload of
>>> work.
>>> 
>>> Writing a cURL script is often the recommended approach for automating
>>> downloading of files from any web site. The usual advice is to use the
>>> LiveHTTPHeaders plugin for Firefox to capture the HTTP requests sent
>>> from Firefox to your bank and then rebuild each of those requests in
>>> cURL. This would work for most web sites, but banks tend to have lots
>>> of security on their web sites. Some of those security measures are
>>> designed to prevent automated scripts from accessing the bank's web
>>> site. For example, I found that using cURL to login to one bank's web
>>> site would fail unless I had also used curl to download one tiny little
>>> .gif file. Yes, the bank's server would fail any login attempt if that
>>> one .gif file had not been downloaded. That can be overcome but then
>>> you'll quickly run in to other problems. One such problem is that banks
>>> often have the browser execute some JavaScript to calculate a value
>>> that then gets sent back to the bank's server. cURL doesn't have a
>>> JavaScript engine so you'd need to find some other tool that can
>>> execute the JavaScript for you.
>>> 
>>> Automating a browser is the best approach I've found so far. At first I
>>> tried using the iMacros plugin for Firefox, but found it very difficult
>>> to handle branching on certain conditions. Eventually I gave up on
>>> iMacros. After I learned to write JavaScript I realized that
>>> JavaScript's very purpose is browser automation. All I needed was a
>>> browser that would let me "inject" some JavaScript into the downloaded
>>> copy of the bank's web page. Unless you are using a browser debugger
>>> most browsers specifically do not allow this for security reasons.
>>> Using a debugger I was able to write a complete script to login to one
>>> specific bank, parse each page, navigate to the downloads page and
>>> download the transactions as an .ofx file.  I became convinced that
>>> JavaScript is absolutely the correct approach.
>>> 
>>> So I had decided to write my own special browser app that would allow
>>> me to inject JavaScript. Earlier I claimed that writing a special
>>> program would be a lot of work, and it would have been. Fortunately
>>> before I invested too much time in writing my own program I found a
>>> commercial product named "Fake."  Fake is a program for OS X. Fake is a
>>> "fake" browser. Fake lets you create a workflow for automating
>>> navigation of a web site. One of the things Fake allows you to do is
>>> inject JavaScript into a bank's web page. Using Fake I was able to
>>> fully automate downloading transactions from one specific bank.
>>> 
>>> What I need to do now is break the JavaScript code into modules so that
>>> code specific to one bank is separate from code that is generic to all
>>> banks. I'd be happy to collaborate with anyone who wants to help build
>>> up a library of code that can automate downloading transactions and
>>> statements from any bank's web site. Let me know if you are interested.
>>> 
>>> -SteveL
>>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> moneydance-info mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> http://moneydance.com/mailman/listinfo/moneydance-info
>> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> moneydance-info mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://moneydance.com/mailman/listinfo/moneydance-info