Scraping a Shopping Site from an External Program

Overview

This tutorial illustrates invoking screen-scraper from other programs in ways more complex than those presented in Tutorial 3. From our external program we'll be passing to screen-scraper search parameters, invoking the scraping process, getting the scraped data from screen-scraper, then iterating over the data, and outputting it within our application.

Before proceeding it would be a good idea to go through Tutorial 2, if you haven't done so already.

If you haven't gone through Tutorial 2, or don't still have the scraping session you created in it, you can download it and import it into screen-scraper.

Tutorial Requirements

This tutorial requires you to be using the Professional or Enterprise edition of screen-scraper. And it requires that you have access to a server (remote or local) that can run one of the external scripting languages that screen-scraper has drivers for: ASP, C#.NET, ColdFusion, Java, PHP, Python, or VB.NET.

Finished Project

If you'd like to see the final version of the scraping session you'll be creating in this tutorial you can download it below.