📄️ Creating an Interactive Extractor
When a website requires an interaction because the URL doesn't change, interactive extractors enable you to record your actions and have them playback automatically.
📄️ Managing an Interactive Extractor
From the Settings tab of an Extractor, you change manage the list of inputs extracted for when an Interactive Extractor starts a crawl run. You can either manually add inputs or import them from a file.
📄️ Interactive Extractors with Authentication
With Interactive Extractors, you can also record and save authentication sequences. This allows you to deal with sites that require the username and password on different pages or websites where you need to perform interactions behind a login. When you input a set of credentials, Import.io will detect this an prompt you to save the login sequence. After replaying the authentication sequence and creating the private session, you then can input a new start URL or begin recording your interactions.
📄️ Interactive Extractors and Custom Inputs
Import.io's interactive extractors allow users to record actions on a page before extracting data. There are times that you will want to have custom inputs for text and dropdown menus. Take a look at the screenshot below. You'll see that there is a text input for Zip Code. You can use Import.io's interactive extractors to parameterize inputs to be customized in the extractor's settings.
📄️ Interactive Extractors with Custom Input Text
Our interactive extractors allow users to create extractors for websites that require interactions in order to properly extract the correct data. Additionally, users can have custom inputs for sources they are extracting from.
📄️ Chaining Interactive Extractors with Other Extractors
Interactive extractors can be chained similarly to how normal extractors are chained. The major difference is that interactive extractors can have custom inputs and these values can be chained from another extractor in addition to chaining URLs.
📄️ Chaining Interactive Extractors with Custom Inputs
Similar to how you can chain extracted URLs from an extractor into the input of another extractor, you can chain extracted values to be used as custom inputs to an interactive extractor. This guide will go through the process of using data extracted from a listings extractor as the input to an interactive extractor.
📄️ Pagination with Interactive Extractors
Sections
📄️ Infinite Scroll with Interactive Extractors
If a website requires you to scroll to load more data, you can build an interactive extractor with infinite scroll to extract from it.
📄️ Interactive Action Selectors
Whenever an action is recorded in an interactive extractor, our algorithm creates a selector for the action. The selector is used to dictate what element on the page will be interacted with. If you're looking to modify the selectors for an action, you can click the action icon and edit the selector. Read more about how selectors work here.