Suggestions for DELL OUTLET REFRESHER

[d-u]

The site is here.

Actually I have already made a program that does it: automatically refresh the site and look for items that meets some criteria, eg. price, specs, ect, and automatically add them to cart. Now I just want to improve on the speed, the refreshing part seem slow since I am using the .Refresh method of the webbrowser control. I am looking for ways to improve the speed, I am experimenting with using 'createDocumentFromURL' method of the HTMLDocument object but encounters some problems with it. Perhaps I could use INET or winsock or some api's out there?

I appreciate your suggestions...

TIA

[Thread1]

unfortunately, it looks like the site itself is slow. as we all know .Refresh will just redownload the document from the site. i don't think using winsock/inet will speed things up.

[d-u]

Actually there are many programs that does what I need and they are fast, they can be configured to search the site a few times per second so I am wondering what I am missing. I use the webbrowser control for this and the HTML objects to do the parsing so I could compare prices. Perhaps I could get the site's html then do the parsing before displaying it using the 'createDocumentFromURL' method of the HTMLDocument?

I am open to any suggestions and I can even use a .Net language just to improve on it if necessary.

[Thread1]

uhum.. sounds like you would want to do a "pre-search" on the document before displaying its content. i think that's good to the fact that it will not resolve and download files/image from any external links.

[d-u]

Yup, that is what I want and I am looking for ways to do just that. Can you suggest a very fast way to do just that?

In .Net could I employ HTTPRequest object for this?

[d-u]

Here is my idea...

I'll use createDocumentFromURL to do the search since it's faster, my problem would be to syncronize the document object of the webbrowser with that of the HTMLDocument object created by createDocumentFromURL method, any one has some suggestion?

[d-u]

No one?

[Thread1]

hey d-u, sorry for my late reply, been busy last weekend.. so you've settld with createdocumentfromurl. in that case, you can load it into the webbrowser as shown in the following code..

Dim doc As MSHTML.HTMLDocument
Dim doc2 As MSHTML.HTMLDocument
  
  ' get document
  Set doc = New MSHTML.HTMLDocument
  Set doc2 = doc.createDocumentFromUrl("<URL>", vbNullString)
  Do Until doc2.ReadyState = "complete"
    DoEvents
  Loop
  
  ' load into webbrowser
  WebBrowser1.Silent = True
  WebBrowser1.Navigate "about:blank"
  WebBrowser1.Document.open
  WebBrowser1.Document.write doc2.documentElement.outerHTML
  WebBrowser1.Document.Close
  
  ' dispose
  Set doc2 = Nothing
  Set doc = Nothing

[d-u]

Thanks Thread1, will try it out!

Though I want to imply that I am open to other suggestions other than using createDocumentFromURL method... Perhaps the fastest way to get the source of a website, check for its content then output it to webbrowser...

[Thread1]

IMHO, winsock may be the fastest option for searching and analizing a web document but it may be the longest and hardest way to go since you have to implement the HTTP to talk with the server, and operate and parse the raw data manually. On the other hand, with the "createDocumentFromURL" you'll get the DOM instantly without the need of parsing and talking to the server. I think there is no much more differences.