When I'm not a systems analyst for a city, I am a volunteer at a community radio station. In addition to my weekly music show, I have been music director for several years. One of my tasks is to submit weekly airplay reports. Our producers fill out playlists in Excel spreadsheet and, after normalizing the entries and copying them into a master sheet for the week, the data is imported into an Access database where I compute airplay stats and send out the results via email.
The problem is that, for several of the reports, I need to include only recent releases. This necessitates doing a search on Allmusic.com to bring up the release date of the CD (and to verify the record label, etc) and physically enter the year into the appropriate table. With over 800 playlist entries per week, you can imagine how labor and time intensive this is. As a programmer and analyst, I figure there has to be a way to automate this process.
I have tried using a copy of the old Crescent Internet Toolpak, but it doesn't seem to even know that Allmusic.com exists. Complicating the problem is the fact that the site uses javascript to send a query to their back-end database, employing a dll in the process. The returned results page also has a bunch of script, but the plain text of the data returned is way at the bottom of the source (using the view page source of my browser).
My question: I am looking for suggestions on how to send an http query to their engine (amg.dll) and get the results in plain text using VB. If there are OCXs out there that will help, or if anyone has done anything similar to this, please let me know.
Thanks!
Steve Jerrett
The problem is that, for several of the reports, I need to include only recent releases. This necessitates doing a search on Allmusic.com to bring up the release date of the CD (and to verify the record label, etc) and physically enter the year into the appropriate table. With over 800 playlist entries per week, you can imagine how labor and time intensive this is. As a programmer and analyst, I figure there has to be a way to automate this process.
I have tried using a copy of the old Crescent Internet Toolpak, but it doesn't seem to even know that Allmusic.com exists. Complicating the problem is the fact that the site uses javascript to send a query to their back-end database, employing a dll in the process. The returned results page also has a bunch of script, but the plain text of the data returned is way at the bottom of the source (using the view page source of my browser).
My question: I am looking for suggestions on how to send an http query to their engine (amg.dll) and get the results in plain text using VB. If there are OCXs out there that will help, or if anyone has done anything similar to this, please let me know.
Thanks!
Steve Jerrett
