Question

I need to read the field value from a webpage using lotusscript. Essentially I am planning on writing an agent to go to a specific URL, get a value from the page, and then use this value for the url it sends the user to.

Can anyone give me a pointer?

A

Answer 1

Update December 2019: As of Notes 10 (released in 2018) there is a NotesHTTPRequest class that does exactly the same thing as my code.

I do this all the time, it is not hard at all (on Windows). I created a class to do this, so it is very easy to implement.

Here is how you call it:

Dim internet As New RemoteHTML()
Dim html As String
html = internet.GetHTTP("http://www.texasswede.com/mypage.html")

That’s it, now you just pull whatever information you want out of the html string.

Here is the class:

Option Public
Option Declare

Class RemoteHTML
    Private httpObject As Variant
    Public httpStatus As Integer

    Public Sub New()
        Set httpObject = CreateObject("MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP")
    End Sub

    Public Function GetHTTP(httpURL As String) As String
        Dim retries As Integer
        retries = 0     
        Do
            If retries>1 Then
                Sleep 1     ' After the two first calls, introduce a 1 second delay betwen each additional call
            End If
            retries = retries + 1   
            Call httpObject.open("GET", httpURL, False)
            Call httpObject.send()
            httpStatus = httpObject.Status
            If retries >= 10 Then
                httpStatus = 0  ' Timeout
            End If
        Loop Until httpStatus = 200 Or httpStatus > 500 Or httpStatus = 404  Or httpStatus = 0
        If httpStatus = 200 Then
            GetHTTP = Left$(httpObject.responseText,16000)
        Else
            GetHTTP = ""
        End If
    End Function


    Public Function GetFile(httpURL As String, filename As String) As Boolean
        Dim session As New NotesSession
        Dim retries As Integer
        Dim stream As NotesStream
        Dim flag As Boolean
        Dim responsebody As variant
        Dim cnt As Long
        Dim buffer As String
        Dim tmp As Byte

        Set stream = session.CreateStream
        retries = 0     
        Do
            If retries>1 Then
                Sleep 1     ' After the two first calls, introduce a 1 second delay betwen each additional call
            End If
            retries = retries + 1   
            Call httpObject.open("GET", httpURL, False)
            Call httpObject.send()
            httpStatus = httpObject.Status
            If retries >= 10 Then
                httpStatus = 0  ' Timeout
            End If
        Loop Until httpStatus = 200 Or httpStatus > 500 Or httpStatus = 404  Or httpStatus = 0
        If httpStatus = 200 Then
            flag = stream.Open(filename, "binary")
            If flag = False Then
                MsgBox "Failed to create " & filename & "..."
                GetFile = False 
                Exit function
            End If
            responsebody = httpObject.ResponseBody
            ForAll r in responsebody
                tmp = r
                Call Stream.Write(Chr$(CInt(tmp)))
                cnt = cnt + 1
            End ForAll
            MsgBox cnt
            GetFile = True
        Else
            GetFile = False
        End If

    End Function

    Private Function getString(ByVal StringBin As string)
        Dim intCount As Long
        getString =""
        For intCount = 1 To LenB(StringBin)
            getString = getString & Chr( Asc(MidB(StringBin, intCount, 1)) )
        Next
    End Function

End Class