Web Browser/RSS Help

  • Thread starter Thread starter TheOriginalStealth
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TheOriginalStealth

This is what I am trying to do. In Access 2007. 1) I want to got to a
webpage and be able to pull that data from page into a table including the
web address. 2) When I open the database again and go to my main form, I want
the database to automatically check the web address that was saved to make
sure its still active, if so move on if not delete the info in the table.
Does anyone know how to do this or is there an article that talks about this.
If so please point me in the right direction.

Thanks in Advance
 
Stuart McCall has an API on his site for a screen scrape of a webpage.

http://www.smccall.demon.co.uk/MiscApi.htm#Scrape

This returns some information, but in a lot of cases not all (this will
return everything you can see by viewing the page source directly from IE).
Sometimes the data is hardcoated into the html, which is retrieveable this
way, but sometimes the data is returned by functions, in which case this
doesn't help.

An alternative would be to see if the site you are trying to work with
offers a way to transport data via XML. If that's the case, you would
generally make an API call to the from the hosts API provided for returning
information (I've used this method for gathering weather info from
wunderground). Microsoft has a free XML parser that will aid in importing
the XML info into your tables.

As for seeing if the site is active, I assum the screenscrape will return an
error of some sort if there's no site, so you can most likely catch this
error to determine the status.

Those are the only ways I know of to do this, and it's very site-specific.
One site you can get it one way, a different site you may have to take a
completely different route.

I'm pretty sure there's a control out there somewhere that enables you to
run explorer inside a form. Maybe that's something more along the lines of
what you're looking for. If you think it might help I'll see if I can dig up
the link, though I've never used it myself and have no idea what kind of
headaches may come along with it.

hth
--
Jack Leach
www.tristatemachine.com

"I haven't failed, I've found ten thousand ways that don't work."
-Thomas Edison (1847-1931)
 
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