Programming Interface

The Content Grabber programming interface (API) provides access to the Content Grabber runtime from your own applications. The Content Grabber runtime can be distributed with your applications royalty free and does not require the Content Grabber application to be installed on the target computer. The Content Grabber runtime requires .NET version 4.5 or higher.

If you want to run agents from a web application, you must use the Content Grabber proxy API. The proxy API interfaces with the Content Grabber runtime using a Windows service. The Windows service is installed as part of the Content Grabber application, so Content Grabber must be installed on the web server.

You can also use simple web requests to call the Windows service without the use of the Content Grabber proxy API. This means that you can easily execute agents and retrieve extracted data from non-Windows environments, such as from a PHP page on a Linux server.

In this chapter, you can learn more about Building a Desktop Application and Building a Web Application.

API Restrictions

The API cannot change the agent command structure, or alter the agent in a way that would change the output data structure. You cannot add, delete, move or copy commands, and you cannot change the Disabled and Export command properties.