The web scraper ScrapeMate allows you to automatically run a ScrapeMap on a schedule by creating a Task for your ScrapeMap. Let’s create a Task to run a ScrapeMap once every day at 8am.
Begin by opening or creating a ScrapeMap. To best test this feature it helps if the ScrapeMap runs quickly. Information on how to create a ScrapeMap can be found in other tutorials. Once your ScrapeMap has been opened open the ScrapeMap Properties Dialog and select the Task tab.
Click the “New Task” button to create a new Task.
The newly created Task will have the data for the Name and Description automatically set.
The Is Enabled option is checked by default. If you wish to temporarily disable a Task without losing your settings you can uncheck Is Enabled.
The 4 options for Task Trigger Type are “MultiDaily”, “Daily”, “Weekly”, and “Monthly”. Which Task Trigger Type you choose dictates the additional Task options you must specify. For “MultiDaily” Tasks you must specify to run the Task every Nth number of hours and minutes. For “Daily” every Nth number of days. “Weekly” which day of the week to run it on. “Monthly” you must specify which day of the month to run the task on and which month to run the Task on, including the option of “AllMonths”. Let’s choose a Task Trigger Type of “Daily”.
Set the Task Start Time for a few minutes from now and select OK to create your task.
Wait a couple of minutes until you expect your ScrapeMap to have completed running and check the ScrapeMap write destination to confirm that the ScrapeMap ran. The run should also be indicated in the ScrapeMap Log which can be viewed in the Log tab of the ScrapeMap Properties Dialog.
If you close your ScrapeMap now it will continue to run at the interval you have specified. To prevent these additional web scraping runs select click the Delete button in the Task tab.
Tasks are run in the background, you do not need to have the application open for them to run. However, your computer needs to be on and it CANNOT be in Sleep mode. If a Task is scheduled to run but your computer is powered off the Task will run the next time your machine is on and not in sleep mode.