Inspiration
Our combined frustration when it comes to navigating the dining services website as well as a member's difficulty in finding vegetarian options before traveling to a dining hall inspired this project.
What it does
Our project is an improved version of the Rutgers Dining Services website, with images and a filter that isolates vegetarian, vegan, non-soy, non-dairy, non-alcohol, etc.
How we built it
First, we began with the back-end aspect which was mostly the data-scraping of the current RU Dining Website. Using Python selenium we looked through each dining hall to create a custom method to scrap the website whenever needed. After scraping the website, we looked at all the ingredients available in the system in order to identify which ingredients lie under different dietary restrictions. Then we made another program that assigns boolean variables to each dietary restriction by looking through each row using pandas in Python. On the front end, we created a website that shows all the dining halls and allows the user to filter the menu items based on their dietary restrictions.
Challenges we ran into
The web scraping caused various problems when trying to scrape different dining halls that didn't follow specific patterns, resulting in using if/else statements to search for certain conditions. Initially, we used Figma to design our website with the intention of using Figment to implement it. However, we ran into issues with hosting our website so we started from scratch and used Azure to make it work. The main problem we faced at the end was using SQLite in order to read the CSV files for the data created from the data scraping in order to show the filter on the actual website.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Making a fully functional data scraper and a program that checks each menu item for dietary restrictions.
What we learned
We learned a lot about our work ethic and ability to persevere despite numerous setbacks. We also all learned new things within the team regarding different languages, programs, and frameworks, by sharing our individual knowledge with each other.
What's next for Menu Magic
Add a feature to inform students about what's included in a meal swipe. Add other meal swipe locations not including dining halls. Add the Interactive Nutritive Analysis/Nutrition Report that the original website has along with portion and quantity. Add kosher and halal dietary restriction options in our filter.
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