The Create New Or Update Existing Table in the Write To options determine how ScrapeMate will output the scraped web data.
Selecting the CreateNewTable option results in ScrapeMate creating a new table each time the ScrapeMap is run.
When writing to a CSV file a new CSV will be created with each ScrapeMap run. When writing to Excel a new worksheet within the Excel Workbook will be created with each web scraping run. When writing to SQLServer a new table will be created with each run.
Choosing UpdateExistingTable will cause ScrapeMate to analyze the data in the write destination and update it accordingly. If no table exists, a table will be created from scratch. If a table exists, the update behavior will be determined by the properties of the ScrapeMap.
The user can specify Key DataAddresses in ScrapeMap’s Details Properties Tab. If the user has specified Key DataAddresses then ScrapeMate will match the data of the Key DataAddress scraped from the data source to those in the write destination. Any matching data rows will be overwritten with the new scraped data. For example, if a list of product descriptions and prices were scraped from a website and the product description was set as a Key DataAddress then product price would be updated with the latest price listed on the website. If a new product was added to the website then a new description and price would be added to the end of the existing data table.
If UpdateExistingTable is selected and there are no Key DataAddresses then the data from each ScrapeMap data scraping run will simply be added to the bottom of the existing table.