Introduction
You can use Custom Autofill to scrape information from websites and save that information to the Custom Data section of your tasks.
Setup & Recommendations
- Before scraping data, you must create tasks within TabSentry. Click here to learn how to create tasks.
- You can utilize MBC Recordings to scrape data across multiple tasks. MBC Recordings lets you record yourself doing something on one browser task, such as scraping data, and then replay that recording on your other tasks. Click here to learn how to use MBC Recordings.
- If you want to scrape data from your emails, you can use Inbox. Click here to learn how to scrape data from your emails.
Scraping Data
1. Navigate to the Tasks > Browsers section in TabSentry. This section has an icon that looks like a globe titled Browsers.
2. Select the task you want to use to scrape data. Right-click the task and click the Start option, or click the Play button to start your task.
3. Navigate to the website you want to scrape data from. For example, I am scraping the Order Number from my Walmart accounts order history page.
4. Once you are on the page you want to scrape data from, click the Tools button in TabSentry and select the Create Custom Autofill Config option.
5. Click the Create button in the Custom Autofill Items section of the dialog.
6. Click the Enable Click to Find Selector button.
7. Click the element/text/link on the page you want to scrape. The text I am scraping is the Order Number.
8. The selector for the data you want to scrape will be auto-filled to the Selector section of the dialog.
9. Navigate to the Data Key > Scraper section of the dialog. Depending on the data you are scraping, select Save Element Text to Custom Data or Save Element Link to Custom Data.
10. Navigate to the Options > Nickname section of the dialog. Write something correlating to the data you want to scrape in the Nickname field. What you write in the Nickname section of the dialog determines the name of the Custom Data entry for your scraped data.
11. After configuring the dialog, click the Save button. Repeat steps 5-10 for each element/text/link you want to scrape.
12. After configuring the Create Custom Autofill Task Feature dialog, click the Save button. Assign the Custom Autofill Feature to your task(s).
13. Navigate to the page from which you want to scrape data and click the Task Assistant button in TabSentry.
14. Click the wand icon in the Actions section of Task Assistant > Features.
15. The scraped data will be saved to your task. You can view it by selecting your task, right-clicking > edit > edit, and then navigating to the Custom Data section of your task.
16. You can scrape data from multiple tasks at once by creating an MBC Recording of you scraping data from one task and replaying that recording across multiple tasks. When you trigger Custom Autofill to scrape data when making an MBC Recording, the recording will remember when you triggered it and trigger it when you replay your recording on your other tasks. Click here to learn how to create an MBC Recording.
17. You can export your scraped data to a CSV by selecting your tasks, clicking the Tools button, and selecting the Export Custom Data to CSV option.
18. A confirmation dialog asking if you want to export custom data from the selected tasks will appear. Click the Yes button to proceed.
19. A confirmation dialog asking if you want to open the exported file's location will appear. Click the Yes button to proceed.
20. You can open the exported CSV to view your scraped data.
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