This section provides a step-by-step description of how a navigation
sequence is normally generated (section Component Configuration
provides an example).
Click on the Rec button to enter the record mode.
A dialog box appears requesting the initial URL of the sequence. This
can either be written directly or pasted from the clipboard (Paste
option in the contextual menu). For example, the Denodo example Webmail
application can be used (see section Presentation of the Example).
The browser automatically loads the initial page of the sequence. The
red light lights up until loading is complete.
Once the traffic lights change to green, the navigation sequence can be
generated. For this, the browser should be used to generate the required
sequence, simply remembering the following two points:
At each page change during sequence generation you have to wait for
the green light to turn on before continuing.
To specify browsing actions, use either of the two methods explained
in section Description of the Navigation Sequences Generator Interface: the contextual menu that appears right-clicking the
mouse or the Fire Actions
menu. Events generated using the keyboard or directly on the
page without using the events mentioned above, will not be registered by
the Generator.
In our WebMail example, the system could be used to generate a sequence
that automatically accesses the content of a user’s Inbox folder and
sorts the messages by date. To do this, you should enter the user
identification (e.g. demos
) and password (e.g. DeMo.04
), by
using the “Set Text” event on each field. Changing the language
selection, if required, is also possible (with the “Select Option”
event). After pressing the form submission button (“Click” event), once
the traffic lights icon turns green click the ‘Date’ link (“Click”
event) to sort the messages by date.
At any point during the generation of the sequence, the Play button
can be used to reproduce the portion of the sequence generated up to
that moment. The system will launch a browser window in which the
automatic execution of the generated sequence can be viewed. A dialog
box will also display the execution trace of the NSEQL commands.
Once the desired sequence has been completed, the NSEQL command program
generated can be saved to disk by pressing the Save button and
selecting the folder and file name as required. Such file will contain
the sequence of NSEQL commands corresponding to the generated navigation
sequence in text format.
Once the sequence has ended, the Stop button should be pressed to exit
the record mode and return to the start mode (this can be done before or
after saving the sequence on disk).
The sequence can be executed at any time by clicking Open and
selecting the file in which it was saved. It is important to take into
account that if the navigation sequence contains any variable, the
execution will not be satisfactory, since it will not perform the
variable substitution.