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ScrapingThis explains more about how webDOM works and gives you a better idea of the most important tool to help you make webDOM do whatever you want.
You'll notice three "pink" fields above the browser, one is a drop down that says "Element," the next one says "Search" and the last one says "Property." These three fields allow you to control the Scrape tool. The tool helps you when you're trying to build a new site profile, or when you're doing things like Automatic ID Population. The scrape tool is a quick alternative to browsing through the possible hundreds of lines of HTML code on a web page. If all else fails and you can't find what you're looking for with Scrape, you can always look at the page source. When you Scrape a site, you are listing all of the elements of the type you specify in the "Element" box. Let's look at an example. Say that you want to find the actual contents of the HTML inside of one of the links on the page. Let's say the link says "Next" and it has an image inside of it to the left of the word Next. You obviously cannot reference just the word "Next" when you're trying to tell webDOM to interact with that link because the image is inside of the <a> tags as well. So how do you find the code that you need to properly reference the link? Select "A" in the element text box, and then just hit Scrape. You should see something like this in the Status & Info section on the bottom right of your webDOMinator form: Scraped all 73 A Elements: 1(14) Images = []: 2(15) Maps = []: 3(16) News = []: 4(17) Video = []: 5(18) Gmail = []: 6(19) more ? = []: 7(23) Groups = []: 8(24) Books = []: 9(25) Scholar = []: 10(26) Blogs = []: ... This list is is from Google Search results. The numbers on the left represent the sequential order of the A elements on the page, both the sequence number in the A list, and the total sequence number in the list of all elements in parenthesis. The information before the equal sign is different depending on what type of element you're scraping. If it's an A element, the "innerhtml" property or just the HTML code within the and tag will be what shows up. So scroll down the list looking for that next link, or since we know that "Next" is a part of the actual innerhtml property, we can do a scrape search. "A" should be selected in the element text box, so in the Search box, type "Next" without the quotes (case does matter), and then in the property box type in "innerhtml" without the quotes. You should see this: Wondering why the code shows up twice? Because to the right side of the equal sign is whatever property you're looking for from the "Property" text box, and to the left is just the standard property that shows for that type of element as a default identifier. You can then reference the exact link by referencing it's innerhtml property which in this case would be: |
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