02.02.09
On the Cusp of a Public Release
Here at screen-scraper we’re on pins and needles as we’re about to release another public version of screen-scraper (we’re anticipating calling it 4.5). Our current alpha release is looking to be pretty solid, and we’re planning on giving it just a bit more testing to ensure that there aren’t any bugs left. If you’re interested in helping us test, feel free to upgrade to the latest alpha version. Here’s a FAQ that might help on that: http://community.screen-scraper.com/faq#80n867.
Chris said,
February 2, 2009 at 1:29 pm
I am enjoying the new features in the alpha releases, especially the syntax highlighting in scripts, the logging levels, and the fact that the last response stays where you scrolled to when you switch tabs (that was really frustrating before). I had a couple of questions, though:
- The logging levels are great, but is it possible to set the logging level in the session.log call in a script? If not, some type of feature like that would be very useful.
- There were a few alpha releases that had a little feature where it would output results to the log tab when you did a “Test Extractor Pattern with Last Response”. But now the feature seems to be gone again. Any reason for this? I liked it, because it was easier sometimes than looking at that JTable, especially with long tokens like the DATARECORD.
Thanks again!
- Chris
Todd Wilson said,
February 2, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Hi Chris,
Thanks for the feedback. On your first point, these methods are available (just not publicly documented yet since it’s still an alpha feature):
session.logDebug
session.logInfo
session.logWarn
session.logError
On your second point, the best approach would probably be to enhance the data set viewer. I’ll make sure we have something like that in our to-do list. Outputting it to the log was actually an unintended side effect of an internal change we made.
Chris said,
February 3, 2009 at 10:36 pm
Nice! Those methods will definitely be useful. How do you guys do release notes, by the way? Just for public releases, like here in this blog, or are there more official notes for minor updates?
Todd Wilson said,
February 4, 2009 at 8:35 am
We do release notes for each major version here:
http://www.screen-scraper.com/release_notes/screen-scraper_release_notes.php#pr4
We actually have an item in our to-do list to include release notes with each alpha in the screen-scraper workbench as well. That way you know what you’re getting each time you upgrade. Watch for that in a future release.
Michael Shiels said,
February 25, 2009 at 1:56 pm
What happened to the ‘run script’ right click menu option? I updated since you are indicating it’s pretty solid, but wow, I need the ability to run scripts at least, that’s something I can’t seem to find anywhere.
Todd Wilson said,
February 25, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Hi,
We actually removed that option in version 4.0. The recommended approach now is to run a scraping session directly, then utilize an initialization script that gets run before the scraping session begins to set up variables and such.
If you have other questions on this would you mind posting to our forum (http://community.screen-scraper.com/forum)? That way others can benefit from the answers as well.
Thanks much,
Todd