Can a plug pull in a whole web page ?

April 6, 200421 yr

Hello

While I am at it. Is there a plug that will retrieve an entire web page and view it in Filemaker?

Thanks

STAN

FileMaker Version: 7

Platform: Mac OS X Panther

April 7, 200421 yr

It depends what you mean by a "web page." A web page could be said to be its text source code, along with referenced objects (such as graphic files). FileMaker is not going to render a web page from that, at least not yet. You can get the source code on Macs using AppleScript to ask the browser; implementation varies however.

If you just want the text (just the text) on the page in a readable form it is simple on OS X using AppleScript:

tell application "Safari"

set theText to text of document 1

end tell

For cross-platform Troi has a URL plug-in, which can get the source code and do more. There may be other plug-ins also. In order to see pictures you would have download them, obviously. I imagine that could be done with AppleScript; but at that point I'd wonder why not just use the browser and the URL.

April 7, 200421 yr

Author

Thanks for the answer

I guess, I want something to get a picture as well. I would like to have a picture come into filemaker. Cross platform. But you don't think the Troi product would do this?

Thanks for your input

Stan

April 7, 200421 yr

I just don't know whether Troi does this or not. I've only messed about with the text myself, on Mac (mostly so I could store messages from this forum :-)

It would have to have the ability to continue downloading the links on a page. It would be nice to only download those which are image tags. A web page is not a "page," just as a FileMaker page is not just a text or image page. Well, on computers nothing really is a page. It's whatever the current application is rendering. A web page is text with tags leading to other files, containing text or images (or movies, or...). It is a composite of separate files and folders. Some, such as ads, lead off to other servers.

If Troi doesn't do it, perhaps one of the PDF plug-ins could, by capturing the web page as an image. I just don't know. But that would be the simplest route, I would think, avoiding the problems above.