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Description isn't being captured

Last post 12-06-2006, 12:44 AM by Andreas. 2 replies.
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  •  12-05-2006, 11:05 AM 6879

    Description isn't being captured

    I created a robot to grab cellphone prices from cingular.com, it's located here: http://openkapow.com/files/folders/shopping_and_travel/entry6878.aspx . When I run the debugger in RoboMaker all the data I asked for is returned, but when I view the rss feed it looks like the url is inserted for the description.

    Can someone take a look and see if I'm doing anything wrong?

     

  •  12-06-2006, 12:36 AM 6907 in reply to 6879

    Re: Description isn't being captured

    Very nice robot you've made there onlyone, seems to me that it can be usefull in many ways (price comparison etc). I've taken a breif look at it and I have an idea of what you need to fix and some ideas of how you can improve it.

    Click Button 

    For me this step (ie when you click the "Go" button on the cingular page to search for phone prices in one zip code) is the problem. I couldnt get the robot to work in RoboDebugger as you could, instead I get the error message "The Click action requires a found tag, but the tag finder did not find any tag. There is no tag that matches the attribute name and value." Maybe you tried in RoboDebugger with another zip code than 02116 and maybe then Cingulars page looks slightly diffrent for different zipcodes.

    Whatever the reason the solution is pretty simple, you need to correct the tag finder for the Click Button step so that the step knows where to click on the page. Do this by going to the Click Button step in RoboMaker (just click on it and wait until it is green). Then you right click on the "Go" button in the browser view and choose "use only this tag". Now you have changed the tag finder in the Click Button step to click on a button it acctually finds.

    Of course you then need to test you robot for a number of different zip codes just to verify that it works (and that Cingular are not changing the look of their page every now and then). If things look different for different zip codes you need to handle that using Error Handling on the Click Button step and putting in other Click steps in other branches. Check the tutorial Create an RSS robot with an input value to search Digg for details about this if you need to. 

    Page Loads & Clicks 

    In your robot starts with a Load Page followed by 3 Clicks, in total this is 4 pages that needs to be loaded. The last of those 3 Clicks loads the page  http://www.cingular.com/cell-phone-service/cell-phones/cell-phones.jsp and it is on this page that the real robot functionality starts (entering data into a form etc). It would be much better to replace the Load Page and the 3 Clicks with one Load Page step loading http://www.cingular.com/cell-phone-service/cell-phones/cell-phones.jsp directly. The performance of the robot would increase many times over since it does not have to wait for response from the Cingular servers as many times.

    Cookies 

    The first step in the robot removes a cookie, however no cookies exists at that point in the robot. The cookies are first loaded on the Load Page step. The Load Page step does the same thing in a robot as if you went to a web page in a browser, and this includes loading all the cookies etc. So if you want to remove a cookie it should be done after the Load Page step. If you dont want to use cookies at all you can also set this in File->Configure Robot->Configure Default Options->All Loading->Enable Cookies. Unchecking this checkbox means that no cookies are loaded in the robot, so then there is no need to take away a special cookie. Beware that this could mean that the robot does not work as it should since maye the web page you are interacting with requires those cookies to function as it should.

     
    That turned out to be one loooong essay answer to a short question. I hope this answered you question and more and that you now can get your robot working as you want it to.
     


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  •  12-06-2006, 12:44 AM 6908 in reply to 6907

    Re: Description isn't being captured

    Just moved this thread from the Support forum to the General Robot Discussions forum. The support forum should only be for discussions of problems with the community or RoboMaker, not with acctually getting robots to play nice.

    "A robot on openkapow is worth two on the harddrive" - old saying

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