Extracting Content

Hand-held devices cannot display as much information as a desktop monitor, so you have to be selective. Figure 7-4 shows two, deliberately undecipherable, Web pages from a Stock Data application.

• A -- The first page is a form where you enter a company's ticker symbol. For example, ORCL is the ticker symbol for Oracle Corporation.

• B -- The second page displays the stock price, and other information about the company.

Both pages are full of ads, buttons, hyperlinks, related articles, and more. Your first step would be to identify the elements of a Web page that you want to make accessible to your service.

Figure 7-4 Extracting Elements from HTML Pages For Display on Wireless Devices

Web Integration Developer: A "Screen Scraper"

Portal-to-Go provides a GUI tool called the Web Integration Developer. It's a "screen scraper" that extracts user interface (UI) elements from a Web page. Using Web Integration Developer tools and functions, you choose UI elements and define corresponding output and input parameters.

Figure 7-5 shows a corner of Web Integration Developer. The Document Browser panel includes the following items:

• The URL of the source page

• A Document node that represents the contents of the source page: paragraphs, images, links, lists, and tables

• A FirstForm node that represents an HTML form. The Web Integration Developer creates a form node for each form in the source page.

• A StockData node that represents the Portal-to-Go service.

The next step is to convert the extracted elements to XML.

Figure 7-5 Using Web Integration Developer to "Scrape the Screen"