2. Overview
A lot of data is available online these days but you don't usually have
access to a web API to extract it.
Finance and stock info, real estate data, product catalogs, search
engine results, social networks feeds, all come in various formats.
Here is where UiPath comes to rescue. With its powerful (and yet easy
to use) new workflow-based technology, it can automatically
recognize the repeating patterns inside structured and tabular data.
With no programming skills required, you can easily save web data in
your favorite format: Excel, CSV, text or even directly deliver it to a
database or web-service.
3. This tutorial
• We are going to explore the web data extraction feature in UiPath
product and we'll extract catalog data from an online retail store.
• First we'll do some web automation to get to the catalog web page.
• Use "Extract Data" wizard to automatically recognize the repetitive
patterns in data structure.
• Optionally you can add Excel activities to save the data in XLS
format.
• Run the workflow to actually get the data.
4. Prerequisite step - web automation
The data you want to extract is usually not on the first page of the web site.
You'll have to perform some login, search, navigation steps first.
Fortunately, all these steps are automatically generated by UiPath web
recorder.
5. All your actions have been recorded and
web activities were added to the workflow.
Now it's time to start the Extract Web Data
wizard.
6. Extract web data wizard
Follow the self-explanatory steps in order
for the wizard to automatically recognize
patterns in your data structure.
You have to select two similar objects for
each piece of data you're interested in (like
product name and price).
For each field you can choose the name
and the information to be extracted (like
text or url).
You can extract as many related fields as
you like.
7. At each step the fields will be highlighted inside the web
page so you can check if the wizard correctly detected the
data pattern.
8. One more check to see if everything is OK and you're almost done!
9. Save the extracted data
By default the Extract Web Data wizard adds a CVS activity to save
the data. You can choose an Excel activity instead and specify
a .xls file location.
The connection between the output of the Extract Data activity and
Excel activity is automatically created. The output is a DataTable
which can be passed to database or web service workflow
activities.
10. Run the workflow
You can launch the workflow from UiPath designer or you may
invoke it from any .Net language (like C#, VB.Net).
At runtime, a browser is open and all recorded web automation
steps are performed. Web data is being extracted and an Excel
workbook will be created.
If the data spreads across multiple pages, it is possible to specify a
repeat step so all the pages will be scrapped.
11. Thanks!
Thank you for your time.
Please feel free to download UiPath trial from:
http://www.uipath.com/
