help interfacing with web form.

[Joey Burke]

Hello,

It's been a long time since I've used visual basic, but I need to dust it off in order to make an app for parsing data at work.

We have a web page we go to that has a few text boxes in which you can enter a number and then click the search button next to it.

Afterwards, you get a page of dates and numbers that I would like to parse into reports.

How could I automate this?

Right now, I have to enter loan # 100001, click search, highlight the result page, and paste it into excel. Then I autosum and rinse and repeat for several loans.

I want to just give the program a list of loan #s to submit searches for, and parse without excel.

Any ideas would be helpful. I am good at parsing, I just don't know how to do this sort of thing.

Maybe I could snoop somehow what the browser sends as a request to the server when you click submit, and send the same data manually using like the web browser control and parse the results? I don't know how to do that..

Any help greatly appreciated

[shirazamod]

Welcome to the forums!

If you aren't too confident in your VB abilities then I suggest using a WebBrowser control and then fill in the form values and submit the form. Then use .InnerHTML to get the html and parse it.

If the webpage is done in ASP/PHP then you can use an Inet control which is faster than the webbrowser and you can navigate it to the page with the values in the URL, eg: "http://website.com/action.php?loan=10001"

[Joey Burke]

thanks for the help, you were terrific.