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<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Navigation: Agent Commands > Capture Commands |
Capture commands capture data from a web page or from an input data provider, and saves the captured data to output. No other type of command can save data to output, so you need a capture command for each data field you want in your output data.
It is important to understand that some commands don't capture anything. For example, the Set Form Field command does not capture the input value that corresponds to a form field, but simply identifies the field. To capture data, you need to use one of the capture commands to acquire the input value and save it to data output.
These are all of the Capture commands available in Content Grabber:
Content Grabber supports the following data types for captured data.
Data Type |
Description |
Short Text |
All content will be captured as Short Text by default. Short Text content can be up to 4000 characters long. |
Long Text |
Long Text content can be any length, but cannot always be used in comparisons, so you may not be able to include Long Text content in duplicate checks. |
Integer |
A whole number. |
Float |
A floating point number. |
Date/Time |
A date and/or time value. |
Boolean |
A value that can be true or false. Boolean values are stored as 1 or 0 integer values. |
Extracted content will be converted to the selected data type at the time of extraction. If content cannot be converted to the chosen data type, a validation error will be generated. The validation error will generate a page error when the command option Raise Validation Error is set to true.
The command option Data Format can be used to specify the date/time format when the data type is set to Date/Time. If the data type is not set to Date/Time, the Data Format option can be used to specify a Regular Expression, and a validation error is generated if extracted data does not match the Regular Expression.
When exporting data to Excel or PDF, data formatting will be set to General by default. This may cause issues when exporting some data types, like Date/Time values. When exporting Date/Time values to Excel or PDF you should always set the ExcelColumnFormat property on the Capture command. The ExcelColumnFormat property takes the same kind of formatting string as the Custom formatting string in MS Excel. For example, the formatting string "yyyy-mm-dd" formats a Date/Time value as year, month and day.