In this article, I will explain how the new bridge system works.
You will need to create at least two separate projects and connect them.
I will start with the listing one.
Go to New – Manual and start filling the project options. On my sample I choose a Books site.
Write the Project name and URL to inspect fields as shown in the image below.
Create a new selector and grab the links to the books (detail pages).
I’m scraping a single page of the listing (20 records) but feel free to explore and extract all the pages of the directory if you want, it’s an optional step.
The selector, h3>a grabs both the book URL and the anchor.
Save the project and create a new one for the details.
Extract the selectors you need.
I just selected the name, price and availability.
As you noticed in the previous image, now we have some automation on the right panel.
The first block is the new bridge.
Click on Add New and create one for your project. You can locate it under the Variable section.
Select the first Project (Books Listing) and the Property that contains the URLs, on this sample the book url.
Remember, this information comes from our previous project. The dropdown controls will help you to select both values.
Add a go-to-url action inside the bridge, and fill the URL value.
Check you are writing the bridge variable correctly, the syntax is {{variable}}
Our variable will be: {{bookBridge}}
NOTE: Older variable syntax was _{{bookBridge}}_ as shown in some screenshots, but you can write just {{bookBridge}} from now.
Next we will create the extract-results action. Don’t forget to add this action when you are using the automation pane, otherwise your scrape will not contain any data.
This is the full view of the automation:
Step 1. Get the URLs on the bookBridge variable
Step 2. Go to those URLs.
Step 3. Extract
Now you can test this by executing the Books Listing Extractor first, and the Books Detail Extractor later.
That’s all!