Visual Web Task is advanced web crawler that parses HTML tags and extracts data and files. It creates spiders for any download and extraction need. You can teach your HTML parser how to negotiate logins, proxies and security pages to download and extract what you need - files, search results, and more. VWT offers a very intuitive user interface, powerful visual parsing and ability to download just what You want, not a whole web site. Examples include extraction the music albums images from search results , list of available online jobs and many others. Businessmen can cut out the whole online business directories or verify prices of online stores. The extracted data can be stored in text files or ODBC databases , downloaded files can be saved on local drive. This software is a part of RNO and fully integrates with all other parts of the development kit. Using office source code generator You can reuse the technology creating robust Visual Basic code and implementing your own HTML parser . For additional information please check out the full documentation .The best test results with Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher.

There are other names, like “Web query” or "Net query," but the meaning is the same: to go to the Web and not simply download, but do something especially useful - for example extract particular parts of data on the web page, download selected files, and perform various other actions.

Any web task has a lot of parameters to be saved somewhere. Our software saves them in an XML file with the extension “.vwt”. These files have a specific XML structure. It is not recommended to access them directly because the structure can and will be changed.

As indicated above, a web extraction task can have a complicated navigation path. In "Visual Web Task" there is a step when the user records navigation to the final web page. This record can contain one or several web sites, and will be a model for how the spider is to behave.

If you have searched for something using Yahoo or AltaVista, you probably noticed that the results of your search usually have the same logical structure. There is some Web address to go to and a short description of the address. Let’s call one search result a ROW, and let’s divide the row into columns . In our simple example it’ll be just 2 COLUMNS – Web address and explanation. It’s very important to create a correct rows/columns layout for the Web task. For any row and column intersection, additional actions can be specified like extract email addresses from, download file, or extract selected text.

Search results are usually represented as a list divided into pages. You should define the “Next Page” action to tell Web Task how to load the next page.