When you are working on a project to get data from a webpage but you don’t have access to the back-end database or a API to get any values out.
The workaround I use until something changes is Web scraping.
I have a project with this problem – it’s another VB.NET one.
My Scraping code goes along like this –
'Get the URL / Navigate a browser window too it (this is hidden in my project WebBrowser.Navigate("http://website.com/pageiwanttoscrape.aspx") 'Convert the HTML of the page to a string using the body.outerhtml function webPage1 = WebBrowser.Document.Body.OuterHtml 'Use the InString function to search for a term in the webPage1 string If InStr(webPage1, "term to search") <> 0 Then 'get the position of the term to search StringSearch = InStr(webPage1, "term to search") 'pick some deatails out of the page using the position + x and capture the next n letters ScrapedText = Mid(webPage1, StringSearch + x, n) 'tidy up anything we don't like out of the returned string ScrapedText = ScrapedText.Replace(".", "") 'now we have the scraped text we can use it in our app End If
Ta-da – workaround using scraping.