Hi
I am very new to Ignition and have done some basic pages with tags from a plc.
Now I need to get some production data and create a daily report from figures from the last 24hrs. The problem I have with this is that the database itself is not accessible to me. I can view the pages and set parameters in the url for the time scale I want to report.
I have seen some mention of screen scraping, that can pull the data from a page without direct access to the database. Is this something that could be implemented in this case ? Could someone assist me with some guidance and ideas of how to tackle this issue.
Thanks for any help.
Laurie
Just to be clear, you can access the data via a url with parameters and you want to scrape the data out of the html that you’d normally render onto a browser because you can’t get at the underlying database?
Yes, I can confirm that is exactly what I want to do, but have no idea how to achieve it, or create a report with the data once I do have it. Any help to get me started would be appreciated.
https://docs.inductiveautomation.com/display/DOC79/system.net.httpGet
This is the method you’d use to get started.
Then I suggest you look at the python re library and the string you get back.
You’re going to basically look for patterns that contain the information you want.
http://pythex.org/ is a great resource to test your regular expressions.
I would particularly read up on look behind assertions and look-ahead assertions.
Feel free to reach out with the raw html to get some help building the regex to find your data.
Thanks for this info above. I am completely new to this system. Would it be possible to have a bit of a step by step guide and maybe a a small example to get me started. I am sure once I can get some data it will all fall into place. Does this imported data have to be stored in a database ?
Thanks for any assistance.