Scripting in JScript

This scripting language is not available by default any more. To use it you will need to edit the AllowUnstableWindowsFeatures in the screen-scraper.properties file.

Overview

Writing scripts in JScript gives you the familiarity of a widely used language, while still providing access to commonly useed Windows libraries. Using JScript within screen-scraper can only be done on a Windows platform, and requires that the JScript runtime be installed. The chances are good that you've already got the JScript runtime on your system.

screen-scraper will automatically detect if the JScript runtime is installed, which you can see by selecting a script from the objects tree in the workbench and clicking on the Language drop-down list. If you don't see JScript in the list then the runtime needs to be installed.

If you do not have JScript runtime on your system you can download it from Microsoft's script downloads page.

Please be aware that because of a bug in the third-party library that allows screen-scraper to integrate with the Microsoft Scripting Engine problems can occur if multiple JScript scripts are run simultaneously. If you're using the professional edition of screen-scraper and plan on running multiple scraping sessions simultaneously you should use Interpreted Java, JavaScript, or Python as a scripting language.

Available Objects

Because screen-scraper uses the native JScript engine, all Active X objects installed on the computer (such as ADO or the FileSystemObject) can be accessed. Additionally, all of the objects mentioned on the Using scripts and API pages are also available.

Example

Java classes can also be instantiated within a script using the CreateBean function. For example, the following script will instantiate a RunnableScrapingSession and run it:

// This particular example will only work with professional and enterprise editions of screen-scraper
// RunnableScrapingSession is reserved for these editions

// Generate a new "Weather" scraping session.
var runnableScrapingSession = CreateBean( "com.screenscraper.scraper.RunnableScrapingSession", "Weather" );

// Put the zip code in a session variable so we can reference it later.
runnableScrapingSession.setVariable( "ZIP_CODE", "90001" );

// Tell the scraping session to scrape.
runnableScrapingSession.scrape();