Application Default Settings allow the user to set a number of default options to streamline interacting with ScrapeMate.
Select the Application Setting button on the left of the top toolbar in the ScrapeMap Explorer Pane.
The first tab within the Application Settings is ScrapeMap Defaults.
Default settings help to streamline your ScrapeMate web scraping sessions, by pre-setting the features that you most frequently use when creating new ScrapeMaps.
The Type of ScrapeMap allows a user to define the default type of ScrapeMap that is created – FreeForm, List or Table. If you find you are using List ScrapeMaps most frequently, change this setting to List.
Enabling Add Date Updated Field will result in this being checked by default for future ScrapeMap output files. All output files will default to automatically include the ScrapeMap run date.
Manually Commit List DataAddresses governs how the selectors of List type DataAddresses are created. When this option is unchecked a List DataAddress will be created as soon as the user has given the ScrapeMap Wizard enough information to form a selector. This is usually just after 2 clicks. If this option is enabled the user will be able to continue clicking on data until they manually click OK to create the DataAddress. This functionality allows the user to expand the selector to include items that might not have been included in the selector generated after the first two clicks. If you notice that a number of items aren’t included after two clicks, enable this option and ReSelect your DataAddress by clicking on the ignored data.
Load Images in Browser (must restart app to apply) disabling this option will prevent ScrapeMate from loading a website’s images into the browser. This may increase browsing speed.
Verbose Logging (records website info for troubleshooting) sets the logging to capture more detailed information on how the ScrapeMap is executing. This is valuable if you are having issues with the ScrapeMap, and this setting assists in understanding how the ScrapeMap is operating.
The Create New Or Update Existing Table options allow you to specify the default values that will be set when creating a new ScrapeMap. You can choose to set the default to always create a new table output, or to update an existing table.
Write To options allow you to specify the default output format. If you regularly write to Excel, then this should be your default application setting.
Delete Browser Cache – Enable this option if you would like to delete ScrapeMate’s browser cache. This can help if your browser is running slowly or plagued by malware. You must restart ScrapeMate to finalize this delete cache setting in your default application settings.