web page to Paradox

[Guest_imported]

Hello,
Does anybody know how to get information from the web into paradox? I need to get one number from the server that publishes market prices everyday and i want my program to get it automatically. Is there any way to get the source of HTML document directly from the web into string variable for further processing?
Thank you,
Vadim

 

[JoeNg]

Not with Paradox, but with VB or Delphi. With Pdox 9, I don’t feel Pdox has the necessary tools to access the web painlessly.

I have VB apps I use to extract historical stock prices for stocks or real estate sales data.
The procedures are not too difficult.

Here is what I would do:
Use your web browser to view the market price.
Look at the Address line, you will see the codes that calls up the market prices.
Now, depending how the market price is retrieved, this method may or may not work.

For example, the codes to look up the stock price for Yahoo is:

http://quote.yahoo.com/q?s=yhoo&d=v1

If you replace yhoo with GE, you would see the stock price for GE.

If you are looking at a specific stock, you can just hardcode this. However, if you want to get other stock prices, all you have to do is replace yhoo to whatever symbols you wanted.

Once you have the info on the screen, you can now save the data to a variable and parse out the information you need.

Not as easy as having access to the source database, but better than do it manually!

 

[Guest_imported]

Thank you for responce!

The problem is that i need to add this functionality to existing Paradox program, not Delphi or VB. If there's no way to do this in Paradox can I call Delphi/VB program from it and get results back to Paradox? Well, of course I can, just could you hint me a better way to do it?
I need to insert that value into Paradox table. Would it be easier to make Delphi insert it there, or better use it just for getting this value and let Paradox insert it into DB ?

Sorry for strange questions, I'm a newbie in Paradox, actually that's my first day trying it

Thanks in advance,
Vadim

 

[JoeNg]

You could use VB or Delphi to create an ActiveX control that you can call from Pdox.
Sorry, I can’t help you on this since I have not done this myself. You could go to a VB or Delphi forum and see if someone can help you there.

Or you could create a standalone program in VB or Delphi.
Use the Execute command in Pdox to run the program.
The program would go to the web site,
get the value,
write it to a text file,
then, have Pdox to read the text file and retrieve the value.

Not pretty, but I think it can be done.