How does screen-scraper simulate moving from one page to another?
Help me understand this: You create a proxy session and then it captures the movements from one page to another as you manually type text into text boxes and click on buttons. That is captured and saved into the proxy session. Then you create a scraping session and scrapeable files.
So how does an external .NET program cause screen-scrape to run through those same steps? It references a scraping session, not the proxy session. Does the scraping session contain the direction that screen-scraper uses to navigate the same pages that a person did when he set up the proxy session? Does the scraping session use the proxy session as a guide?
Gary, When you first set up a
Gary,
When you first set up a scraping session you use the proxy to help construct the individual scrapeable files. After you have them set up you no longer use the proxy server. It is just there to make it easier to know what each request needs in order to get back the appropriate reply.
There's nothing stopping you from creating a scraping session without using the proxy server. But it's much easier if you use the transactions from your proxy session as the basis for building your individual scrapeable files.
A good practice when building scraping sessions, and a demonstration of how this works, is for each proxy transaction that you migrate over as a scrapeable file to first run your scraping session to see if it works. That is, to see if you what you're expecting appears in the last responses. If it does, then you can start to extract values from one scrapeable file and pass them to another as session variables.
It can be tedious, but it's worth it, to take the time to go carefully through each tutorial.
http://community.screen-scraper.com/Tutorials_Menu
-Scott