| Solution |
| 1. |
Pre-requisites |
- Let's say you have a list of ISBN numbers for the books for which you
want to extract the information like publisher name, paperback, product
dimension etc.
- Keep your website from which you want to extract the information, open.
- Keep the database to which you want to transfer your data open. For
e.g.. Microsoft Access
|
| 2. | Search for the book
by ISBN number |
- Keep one notepad window open.
- Click on Record
- Enter one ISBN number in the search box of the website and click on
enter.
- It will bring up the book details.
- On the resultant page, type Ctrl + A and Ctrl + C to select the contents
of the entire page and copy them
- Paste the copied content to the notepad window by typing Ctrl + V.
|
| 3. | Extract the required
information for one book |
- In the notepad window, type Ctrl + HOME to go the
beginning of the copied text.
- Type Ctrl + F to bring up the Find window
- Type in 'Publisher:' to look for the Publisher word.
- Once the word is found, hit Escape to remove the Find window.
- Hit the Right arrow to remove the selection.
- Type Shift + End to select the actual Publisher name and copy it using
Ctrl + C.
- Now paste this data into your database using Ctrl + V. After you paste
it into one field, you can move to the next field by hitting a Right Arrow
or TAB key.
- You can repeat the above steps for other headers that you want to
extract for e.g. paper back, dimensions etc. and transfer them to the
database.
- Stop the recording and save the task.
|
| 4. | Extract information
for all the ISBN numbers |
- In order to extract the same information for all the ISBN
numbers, you would need to make few changes to the recorded task by editing
it in the Task Editor.
- Create a List variable called ISBN-List from Tools->Variable Manager and
assign the list of ISBN numbers. Refer to Screenshot 1
- Alternatively, the list can be read from the text file as well.
- Select your recorded task and click on Edit to open
the task in editor.
- Identify the keystroke where you typed the ISBN
number.
- Double-click it to open it in editor.
- Replace the actual ISBN number with the $ISBN-List$
variable.
- Save the Keystrokes command.
- Now insert a Loop for List (ISBN-List) around the
actions that enter the ISBN number and extract the information. This will
repeat your actions for all the ISBN numbers and enter the extracted
information to your database. Refer to Screenshot
2
- Your final database will look something like as shown
in the Screenshot 3
|
| When you run this task, it will loop
through all the ISBN numbers from your list and extracts the required
information from the website for that book and transfers it to the database. |
|
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