VisibleWeb - Product - Users

A Personal Share Portfolio

This page describes how VisibleWeb can be used to track a stock or share portfolio. This example should allow you to assess whether you have the computer skills to use VisibleWeb successfully. You need to be familiar with using the Internet.

The approach is for illustrative purposes. With little difficulty it should be able to be applied to other types of information assuming the information is held in similar information sources.

Information sources can change from being open freely available to being restricted to those individuals with a valid user identifer and password to being restricted and require individual form submission. VisibleWeb can be configured and easily reconfigured to cope with these changes.

The situation

It is assumed you have a share or stock portfolio. You are finding it very tiresome to visit each web page for each of your holdings on your favourite financial information web site so that you can find out the latest information.

You have bookmarked many of these web pages but periodically your favourite financial web site reorganises and changes the web page addresses. The web page address of each page is known as the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for that web page. URL changes means work to edit manually each bookmark.

You know there must be a better way and are willing to give the free version of VisibleWeb a try.

1. Open Information Sources

The steps for configuring VisibleWeb to retrieve open freely accessible web pages are as follows:

Connect to the Internet. Find out the URL for each web page that needs to be retrieved. Disconnect from the Internet.
Create a directory (folder) on your computer to store the retrieved web pages.
Create a file (document) on your computer which contains the URL names of the web pages to be retrieved.
Create a file (document) on your computer which contains the file names of where the retrieved web pages are to be stored after retrieval.
Create the VisibleWeb command file.
Connect to the Internet. Run the VisibleWeb command file. Disconnect from the Internet.
Open each retrieved page in turn using browser or web capable word processor software. View the information.

Some information sources provide the information in spreadsheet or comma separated file or xml format. These formats can be handled and content filtered with little difficulty to just extract the items of interest.

2. Closed Information Sources

Your favourite information source web site requires you to register and provides you with a user identifer and password without which you can no longer access the information you need.

Add the user identifier and password to each URL name in the file of URL names that you created above.
Continue as before.

3. Secure Information Sources

Your favourite information source web site is concerned about security and wants to prevent eavesdroppers and in consequence requires you to access the web site using "HTTPS" the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol register instead of "HTTP".

Amend each URL name in the file of URL names that you created above to refer to the replacement "HTTPS" version.
Continue as before.

4. Form Based Information Sources

Your favourite information source web site now requires you to complete a form each time you want to request information.

Amend each URL name in the file of URL names to be the form action program that is executed when the form is submitted. You need to view and analyse the actual HTML source of the form web page to find this name.
Create a file (document) on your computer for each form that you which to submit containing the particular form field data for that submission. You need to view and analyse the actual HTML source of the form web page to find the fields and values to be entered into each field.
Create a file (document) on your computer which contains the file names of the files which contain the form field data.
Amend the VisibleWeb command file for form submission.
Continue as before.

A worked example

This example retrieves information from three web pages. Click on each link to see the contents of each web page or file. Use the "back" button of your browser to return to this page.

Assume that there are three information source web pages with the following URLs:

You create a local file with a list of URL names.

my-url-list.txt containing


    # my-url-list.txt created 31 March 2001
    #
    http://www.whywaitforever.com/vw/sample1/page-info1.html
    http://www.whywaitforever.com/vw/sample1/page-info2.html
    http://www.whywaitforever.com/vw/sample1/page-info3.html

You create a local file with a list of the names for each web page retrieved.

my-page-list.txt containing


    # my-page-list.txt created 31 March 2001
    #
    retr-info1.html
    retr-info2.html
    retr-info3.html

You create the VisibleWeb command file. This should be a "*.bat" file but is here stored as a "*.txt" file to prevent it being run in error and to allow it to be viewed.

my-vw-bat.txt containing


    REM my-vw-bat  WhyWaitForever 31 March 2001
    REM
    REM This command file retrieves web pages.
    REM


    REM  Set the home disk and directory
    C:
    cd C:\whywaitforever


    REM  Set the parameters 
    set myurl=*my-url-list.txt
    set mypag=*my-page-list.txt
    set myrep=my-vw-report.txt


    REM  Url retrieve single submission
    call system\command\licence.bat  
    call system\command\sys01.bat  
    call system\command\exe01.bat

You run the VisibleWeb command file and the three retrieved pages are:

The information for each page has been retrieved but each page links to an external file (a style sheet). The style sheet has not been retrieved and so the retrieved pages display differently than they do originally. A run report is produced in the "*my-vw-report.txt" file.

Now download VisibleWeb and try for yourself to repeat the above example.