What is a RunnableScrapingSession?
I know how to implment one, etc. but I'm confused about it's intent and behavior.
Is it just another scrape that kicks off via script but lives independantly, or does the session from the "calling" scrape inherit the session (and it's variables) from the RunnableScrapingSession?
Or is it meant just as a "kick this off and let it do it's own thing" (like writing to a database..)?
What is a RunnableScrapingSession?
fnirt,
The purpose of the RunnableScrapingSession class is usually to start a scraping session from outside of the workbench. It can also be used within or without the workbench to call multiple scraping sessions from one "controller" script. It also allows you to pass variables and call methods when starting your session.
For example, we recently had a client who wanted to search medical text references online. They wanted to be able to search for a set of given search terms with corresponding date ranges.
We were able to create a script that read in a CSV with the search terms and date ranges. As it iterated the rows of the CSV it would call RunnableScrapingSession for each row and then dispatch out to each site individually. This created a different scraping session for each search term/site combination. We upped the maximum number of concurrent scraping sessions to 5 or so allowing screen-scraper to gather down rather large amounts of info in less time.
Please have a look at the API documentation here if you haven't had a chance yet.
http://www.screen-scraper.com/support/docs/api_documentation.php
Please let me know if you have any specific questions.
Thanks,
Scott