Main Page
From Screen Scraper
Contents |
What is screen scraping?
To get started, read out the challenges to extract data from other application screens.
What's included?
ScreenScraper Studio or SSS for short is an application that lets you automate screen scraping scenarios. A typical scraping scenario requires extracting text from a certain region of a window. The first step of a scenario has to identify that window based on window title, window class and the name of the application that created the window. Once the window has been identified a screen scraping method is used to extract text from the whole window or a rectangular region. The plain text is saved as a text file or an excel sheet. Often the scenario has to be repeated at a predefined time interval to get the text changes. ScreenScraper Studio is built on the top of UIElement and TextCaptureX SDKs. You don’t need programming knowledge to use it but if you are developer it is useful to learn how to use the SDKs with your own applications.
TextCaptureX is a COM library that comes with SSS and exposes the actual screen scraping methods. Please note that TextCaptureX can be deployed individually without the SSS. Screen scraping is traditionally a difficult task and there isn’t one single method that works in all scenarios.
TextCaptureX offers 3 kinds of scraping methods:
- Native methods were designed with speed and accuracy in mind. It is able to extract visible text on the screen with 100% accuracy and typically it takes 10 to 30 milliseconds to get the data. It works with most applications and all languages available on Windows.
- FullText methods address the requirement to get the text that is not visible such as in scrolling windows. It is still very fast and has 100% accuracy but it works on a lesser range of application than the native method.
- OCR methods are useful to scrape images and scanned documents or the rare type of applications that renders everything on the screen as a single bitmap. It should be used when none of the above methods works.
TextCaptureX library can be deployed separately and does not require ScreenScraper Studio to be installed on the target machine.
TSelection is a COM library that exports a user interface functionality which allows the user to select a rectangle or a UI element at a given screen location.
UIElement is a library that comes with SSS and aims to identify a window or control on different runs of an application. It is build around the idea of recognizing a window or control based on immutable attributes like title, class, relative position among other controls (and unlike window handle that changes every time the window is created or screen coordinates that change with window size or resolution). Based on such attributes we calculate a readable ID that can used to programmatically identify the running instance of a window.
UIElement library can be deployed separately and does not require ScreenScraper Studio or TextCaptureX to be installed on the target machine.
Samples
Download here our samples in C#, VB.Net, VB6, C++, Delphi, Jscript.
Professional Services
If you are unfamiliar with screen scraping and how to use ScreenScraper Studio and or TextCaptureX, you can contact sales@deskperience.com and we do have professional services offerings available where we can solve your screen scraping requirements.
Not found what you are looking for?
Looking for something that doesn't quite fit into the rest of the website? Want to add it yourself? Well you're at the right place. Please feel free and encouraged to post here whatever information you feel is useful and appropriate for the others. If it fits into the existing structure, follow it. If the existing structure sucks, change it. If something is wrong, fix it, and so on. It's a wiki. You know what it's for. (And if you don't, head on over to the SandBox while you figure it out.)
