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Help appreciated for newbie

Hi,

I've just downloaded screen-scraper and before I purchase a licence I want to ensure it does what I believe it will.

I want to create a stock check site and this site needs to actually add the product to the basket before it reports whether it's in stock or not:

http://www.next.co.uk/shot.asp?b=X42&p=20018&s=4&n=Homeware&pid=423-578&...

Please can give me some examples of how it might work. Any help appreciated.

Thanks

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monkeynutz on 09/23/2008 at 12:49 pm

Sorry for the long wait

Sorry for the long wait before you got a reply... Busy busy busy.

Yeah, screen-scraper can add the item to a bag/cart and then just check to see if the item says if it's out of stock.

The task itself would be trivial, but it would obviously take a little bit of time for screen-scraper to go out and check for availability. You'd also have to (of course) decide how often screen-scraper goes out and checks the stock of the item on this other site. Or, theoretically, you could try to set up a model where screen-scraper goes out in real-time and checks the availability as requested on your site.

Screen-scraper could scrape the item ID numbers ahead of time (over night, once a week, whatever you want), and then when a client on your site needs to see the stock amount for the item, screen-scraper can just send a quick request out to www.next.co.uk telling it to add item X to a cart. That way, you minimize the amount of time needed to find the stock quantity in real time.

I hope that answers your question :)

 timv on 10/03/2008 at 3:34 pm