These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

CALLING ALL CATTLE! AUTOMATING SWA’S ON-LINE RESERVATION RETRIEVAL

Problem

Anyone who has flown Southwest can appreciate this attempt to quell the cattle-call to the gates. As much fun as it is to line up with all the “B”s or “C”s and glare at the “A”s as the “A”s take all the good seats, let’s face it, we would rather be an “A”.

The boarding hierarchy is a first-come-first-serve policy which obligates an A-boarding-pass hopeful to shut him/herself off from the world at precisely 24hrs prior to the boarding time and retrieve the boarding pass. Unfortunately, it is not always convenient to drop everything and repeatedly hit “Submit” over and over until you get your boarding pass.

Solution

This Visual Basic Application will ask the user for the confirmation number, first name and last name. Then it will connect through the SWA website to check the validity of the information entered by the user. If the information is correct, the user will be “cleared” to set Excel to automatically retrieve the boarding information at precisely 24 hours before the flight time. While the user can close the active workbook, Excel must remain open in order for the self executing macro to fire. Therefore, as a best practice, this application should only be run a couple of hours before the 24-hour mark.

After retrieving the boarding information, it can send the user an email with the boarding pass number (if the user so desires).

*Note: I set up a dummy gmail account to send the email. However, because this is a public domain, I deleted the gmail username and password in the code. Therefore, in order to have email functionality, you will need to code your own username and password into the "Sendemails" module.

Project File: Excel file
Project Write-up: PDF file

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