Introduction to the Tools¶

This section describes the basic characteristics of the “Wrapper Generator Tool” (see Main areas of the Wrapper Generation Tool) and the “Sequence Generator” (see Sequence Generation toolbar), although they will be explained in detail in their respective sections (sections Generation Environment Tools - Part I , Generation Environment Tools - Part II and Generating Navigation Sequences of this manual).

To launch the “Wrapper Generator Tool”, you can either use the button of the same name in the “ITPilot” pane of the Denodo Platform Control Center or execute the script <DENODO_HOME>/bin/itpadmintool_start.

The main screen of the Wrapper Generation Tool is shown in Main areas of the Wrapper Generation Tool and is divided into three main areas:

Menu bar: contains the following menus

• The “File” menu allows:

  1. Creating a new project or wrapper.

  2. Reloading the current wrapper from disk.

  3. Saving wrappers in disk.

  4. Saving wrappers as templates. Templates are useful when several wrappers follow similar structure, so they do not need to be created from scratch.

  5. Saving the current wrapper as a new custom component (see section Saving a Flow as a Custom Component).

  6. Saving the current wrapper as a new extension (see section Exporting a Flow as an Extension).

  7. Importing and exporting wrappers (see section Migrating Wrappers Between Generation Environments: Import and Export).

  8. Adding extensions to the Generation Environment (see section Managing Extensions).

  9. Loading a wrapper from the list of recent wrappers.

• The “Edit” menu allows copying and pasting the components that participate in a wrapper. Additionally, the “Paste and rename variables option” allows you to paste components avoiding name conflicts between the variables used by the components.

• “Process” contains options specific to the current wrapper:

  1. Generate the JavaScript of the wrapper

  2. Test its execution (see section Wrapper Generation, Tests and Exporting)

  3. Open information and configuration dialogs of the wrapper: catalog explorer (see section Use of the Catalog Explorer) and wrapper options (see section Wrapper Advanced Options: Specific Browser Pool and Locale).

• “Deploy” allows generating the VQL code of the wrapper (‘VQL Generator …’) or deploying the wrapper into the Wrapper Server (‘Server deploy …’). See section Deploying Wrappers to the Wrapper Server for more information.

• The “Browser” menu allows launching and closing browsers. The browsers are used during the wrapper creation process to create navigation sequences (see section Web Browsing Automation) and to mark examples of information you want to extract from a web page (see section Configuration of the Extractor Component).

• The “Tools” menu allows to open the NSEQL Sequences debugger (see section Using the Sequence Debugger), the Scanners and Tagsets configuration tool (Tagsets and Scanners), the extension management Tool (see section Managing Extensions) and the dialog for configuring tool preferences (see section Generation Tool Global Preferences).

• The “Help” menu allows accessing the Denodo Platform documentation.

Browsing Area: this area is divided in two tabs

• The Projects tab, displays the projects along with the wrappers for each project.

• The Components tab displays the list of components ready to be used in the wrappers, including those provided by the tool (see Appendix C: Catalog of Components) and any custom components created after the installation (see section Saving a Flow as a Custom Component for further information). This tab is disabled when no wrapper is being edited.

Work area: This is the main area of the tool and is where the wrapper is graphically created by adding, configuring and combining the graphical components into a web automation process.

Main areas of the Wrapper Generation Tool¶

As it has been already mentioned, the process of wrapper generation is aided by a toolbar installed in the MSIE browser. This toolbar can be seen in Sequence Generation toolbar. The function of each of the buttons and options will be explained in detail in section Generating Navigation Sequences.

Sequence Generation toolbar¶