help from web / programmer
 

Hi All,

Need to see if anyone can help.

Basically, in my job I spend loads of time logging onto web sites getting prices for computer parts/laptops/monitors etc etc. I have to log onto about 5 sites to check best prices before giving customers quotes.

So what Id like to be able to do is enter the part code into a website , press a button and for it to go off and come back telling me the various prices and stock levels from the suppliers sites.

So I guess this can be done in some form of macro or something??? if anyone can point me in a direction of how to do this, or a programme that I can tweak to do it I would realy appreciate it - Im pretty technical so hoping I might be able to do this myself!

cheers


Andy

Have you tried http://www.pricerunner.co.uk/

sorry that wont help, these are distributor websites that the public cant view - but I want to almost write an equivilant!

Assuming the 5 sites are all driven by some form of database, you will need to work with them and write a script that can access all those 5 databases.

Easy enough to do, but you need the server access in turn to be able to do it.

You can automate it if you don't have the back-end access. I'd use something like WWW::Mechanize with an HTTP::Recorder proxy to generate Mechanize'd scripts and put a front end onto that, but that's non-trivial and subject to source site modification problems.

well the only other way is if the sites ues query strings in the urls to return the product info but Im pretty sure yoo would have to write something bespke. You can get off the shelf 'screen scrapers' that would parse the page though.

How about a page with n frames where the URL of each of the sites with the query string is in each frame. This is of course assuming the searches are done on the suppliers sites using an HTTP get rather than POST.

You could use something like CFHTTP in Cold Fusion or XMLHTTP in ASP to return the rendered code from each page as a text string and then rip that string up as you need.

XMLHTTP Example