Hi Friends,

This is siva from chennai.
I am going to write a good scripter using C# that can capture data from a web page. The data seems to be coming down in XML format and I cannot find how to access it.
Here's the 30 second rundown on how I get to the data now...
Login to a web page (I have a membership)
Select the search
Input the date range and select search button
Output is displayed in a table with links to the actual data
I must then click on each link, which brings up a screen with all the data I
need.
I must do this for each dataset... there are hundreds.
I'd like to automate this process and capture the data into a database.
Is "screen-scraping" a possibility? If so, generally, how does that work?
Or is there a more effective approach to getting at that data in realtime?

Thanks for any thoughts,

Sivakumar.B

Not really an Ajax topic but you have two basic approaches:

1) Automate Internet explorer to duplicate your manual actions. Can be difficult to allow for errors etc.

2) Use a programmatic way to access the pages using something like XmlHttp. For example use the msxml2.xmlhttp.4.0 class to send a GET/POST request with the necessary request data.

The second approach is more reliable if the page itself does not rely too heavily on JavaScript.

Try seacrhing Google groups in Microsoft.public.* for internetexplorer.application and XmlHttp.


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Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)