So, I had this idea of creating an app for my college attendance. The thing is that the attendance is accessible as students login the online portal and then enter their credentials. Is there any way I can login to the portal, fetch content from the portal and show in my app in a beautiful way?
I tried all sorts of things I know. WebView is just idiotic for this task and nothing really works if it isn't my server. Any ideas how to do this?
Check to see if your college has any sort of open API with good documentation.
If they do, that will solve all your dramas. However, it's incredibly unlikely.
It sounds like your college uses some sort of SSO (Single Sign On) system. If you can find out which one they use, you'll be able to find documentation for it, which will likely let you develop an Android native solution to logging in. Bear in mind, the college/SSO provider will more than likely have to give you access to this.
Otherwise, you're probably stuck to a WebView for login. You could use a WebView for login, then get all the content you need and close the WebView and do the rest as native app stuff.
Even then your options are fairly limited. You'll more than likely be stuck parsing full HTML responses and getting the content you want out of them. It's a pain, but possible (see this answer for an example on parsing an HTML table).
tl;dr, I reckon you're fighting a losing battle.
Check if your college has it's open api- If not-the only.thing you can do is parse all the html. With the login you will have to check which system your college uses and use their api.
