USER MANUALS

Creating Projects and Wrappers

Wrapper programs must be created within a project. In this case, we will create a project called “MAILWRAPPERS” and a wrapper called “WEBMAIL”. The projects are displayed in the Projects tab of the Browsing Area (see Empty projects list). Note that there exist three pre-configured projects that are not editable:

  • “Default Project” is a regular project where wrappers can be added.

  • “Templates” is a special project which is explained below.

  • “Custom Components” is another special project which is explained in section Saving a Flow as a Custom Component.

Empty projects list

Empty projects list

Project and process creation screen

Project and process creation screen

To create a new project, right-click Projects and then, click New > Project on the contextual menu. The workspace will display several configuration parameters (see Project and process creation screen), including a text field, where the project name can be entered. In this case, call it “MAILWRAPPERS”.

When creating a new project, it is possible to create a process at the same time by checking the “Create a process” option (note that). A name for the new process must be entered. In this case, the name will be “WEBMAIL”.

Denodo ITPilot provides three templates, useful so the wrappers do not need to be created from scratch:

  • BasicTemplate: a template of a wrapper that extracts data from a single web page.

  • StandardTemplate: a template that queries a web form extracts the data from the results page and iterates over the possible pagination intervals.

  • StandardDetailTemplate: a template that queries a web form, extracts the data from the results page and the “detail” page of every record and iterates over the possible pagination intervals.

These templates fit our example perfectly but we will not use them so that we can explain how components are placed and interconnected in the workspace. Therefore, we will de-select the “Create Process from Template” option.

Note

You can create your own templates by creating wrappers inside the project “Templates”. If you want to save an existing wrapper as a template, you can copy it to the “Templates” project or use the option ‘File -> Save as template…” (both actions have the same effect).

Now leave the “Automatically open the process in the process builder” option unchecked and press the Ok button to create both project and process (see Creating a new project and process). Now the project is displayed in the Browsing Area (see New project and process). You can delete a project by selecting it and pressing the DEL key or using the “Drop” option from the project’s contextual menu. Deleting a project involves eliminating all of its associated wrappers and, therefore, you must be careful with your selection. On deleting a project the tool allows you to specify whether the wrappers eliminated are deleted from the display tool only or also from the hard drive. If they are only deleted from the tool, they will disappear from the project view but they can be retrieved again by selecting the Refresh option from the project’s contextual menu (by clicking with the right-hand button of the mouse on the specific project) or by selecting the Add Processes option and then choosing the specific process to be retrieved.

The processes can be copied and moved from one project to another using the “Copy to Project” or “Move to Project” options from the contextual menu of each process. You can also move processes by dragging them from the source project and dropping them on the target project.

The projects / processes can be migrated between different installations of the Wrapper Generation Tool using the “Export” and “Import” options from the “File” menu (see section Migrating Wrappers Between Generation Environments: Import and Export).

Finally, you can create new processes using the option New -> Process from the project’s contextual menu.

Creating a new project and process

Creating a new project and process

New project and process

New project and process

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