Web browser control with Dolphin

I'm nearing the end of the somewhat quixotic process of trying to write
an automated betting program for Australian horse racing in Dolphin -
the web crawler portion extracts up to the minute racing information
from the Victorian TAB website, and the analysis portion comes up with a
list of bets I should make (whether this list of bets is any good is
another issue entirely...). At the moment, the bets I should make are
simply printed to the transcript and I manually make the bets.

Bets are made by typing numbers, checking tickboxes, and clicking on
buttons on a web page consisting of several frames, which communicates
to the TAB server over an SSL connection. I would like to
programatically do all this via Dolphin, and it struck me the other day
that I'd seen a Dolphin web browser demo which was basically a wrapper
around the Microsoft Explorer DLL or something similar, which set me to
wondering about how rich the programatic interface to Explorer is. Can
anyone offer advice about the feasibility of this approach, and possibly
some pointers to information sources on the web.

The approach I *was* going to try is baroque in the extreme - Dolphin
talking over a socket to a Macromedia Director Shockwave applet embedded
in a framed web page which would then talk Javascript to other panels in
the same frame, thus filling in the betting form. I'm not sure if this
would ultimately work, but it's undeniably ugly and fragile sounding.
You can see why an all-Dolphin solution would appeal!



                                         Steve

--
Work as if you were in the earlier days of a better nation.

On Thu, 31 Jan 2002 03:55:42 GMT,
Steve Taylor <[hidden email]> wrote:
Is there some special applet on the page where you place your bets?

Because if not, you can take a look at the html and find out the parameter
names and values that are transmitted to the server. If you are lucky,
all is sent via the http GET method, which means that you can create
a link http://place.your.bet/action.cgi?key=value&key=value.... and
open it in the browser control.

Another possibility would be to port the WebUnit environment to Dolphin.
There you could take the betting page and insert your specific values
into the respective places.

Generally I would avoid emulating mouse clicks or keystrokes and go
for the protocol layer below.

Good luck with the horses.

s.
--
Stefan Schmiedl
EDV-Beratung, Programmierung, Schulung
Loreleystr. 5, 94315 Straubing, Germany
Tel. (0 94 21) 74 01 06
Public Key: http://xss.de/stefan.public

shhhh ... I can't hear my code!