Toolkit for interfacing with a website

[USar]

There is website which our application needs to interface with it. Is there a toolkit or some other program available which allows you to do this and would work with LV or TS ? i don't have a lot of time and resources to get this done so what would be the simplest/quickest way to achieve this ?

[Matthew_Kelton]

There's the internet toolkit.  Since you didn't really describe what you are trying to do, it may be simple, it may not.

[nathand]

If you're using Windows, you may find it easiest to embed Internet Explorer as an ActiveX component and control that.  The methods available are not always straightforward but are well documented on MSDN.

[USar]

Matthew -

Okay so below are some of the steps which i am looking to execute:

- Open a webpage www.abc.com [it is a gui to access a server]

- Enter a username/password to login to the website

- After logging in, click okay on the next page to a prompt to continue

- Select a file?! Perhaps read some data (status) from the webpage?!

i will be using the website more in the next few days and will have a better idea on what needs to be implemented. so ideally i would like to have a VI which can perform these steps and return the output in PASS/FAIL so the existing application we already have can proceed accordingly.

[Matthew_Kelton]

The internet toolkit has HTTP VIs which you can use to navigate.  I haven't personally used them.  If you go here, there are several docs that can give you some idea of what is available.  The toolkit can be downloaded and used for 30 days, so you can evaluate whether you can do what you want.

[rolfk]

It certainly can be done but depending on the implementation of that site (HTML, HTML5, JavaScript, Flash) it could be a very tedious and painfull process. I have done such things in the past with my own TCP/IP based HTML functions and that worked fairly straightforward for normal HTML forms. JavaScript and Flash however would be probably almost impossible to automate in the way you describe, since you do not want to implement a JavaScript or Flash interpreter in LabVIEW (which would also require a fairly well working HTML interpreter as well).

[USar]

Thanks Matthew/Rolf.

Rolf, i looked at the website and it does use Javascript. From what i can tell, it does not seem to be using Flash. Do you know if there is a third party tool for this purpose which can accomplish this interaction with a website and also communicate to a LV or TS environment ? (via TCP/IP?!, Serial?!)