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Capturing a web page

I'll start by describing the problem itself. Instead of a problem, I'm looking for a better solution. I have an asp.net page that has a bunch of images and a link below it. Each image displays the latest render of the link below it.

I assigned a bat script that runs every hour to get images through the webpage rendering utility's IECapt utility. One thing is annoying with this utility, it takes a long time for the 20 images I have, and for some because the Flash content is missing the actual screenshot on the website.

Now I would like to know if this rendering can be done by traditional programming, I am not interested in using any utilities. I'm interested in trying this. The solution doesn't have to be based on C # and I'm willing to try it in any other language. Because it gives me the opportunity to learn.

Thanks.

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You should probably take a look at moz-headless-screenshot

You should be able to inline the functionality you want.



http://blog.mozilla.com/ted/2010/07/29/moz-headless-screenshot/

he also provided a sample embed client application called moz-headless-screenshot. It is a simple command line tool that takes a URL, image size and output file name and creates a PNG screenshot of a web page.

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You should look at the browser snapshots:

http://browsershots.org/



They do what you want to do for a lot of different browsers. It's even open source.

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There is no simple simple solution for what you are asking. This is because rendering HTML, CSS and Flash is actually a very complex process.

If you're coding a little, you can use the Gecko engine (which includes firefox) or another open source web browser engine (like Dillo) to render the page to a custom canvas. Then save this canvas to a file. However, if you don't implement browser plugin support, you won't get Flash this way. You can try using Gnash or similar. Good luck with that.

I don't know of an open source project that already does this. It would be neat though :-). If you write something, please push it to the world; it would be great to have a "get link to this url" tool.

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One way is to use the IRobotSoft web scraper. You can design a robot to access a URL every time and capture the entire web page as an image using the CapturePage function (image file).

I'm not sure if it will be better than IECapt.

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We have successfully used ACA WebThumb ActiveX Control ( http://www.acasystems.com/en/web-thumb-activex/ ) to capture parts or all of a web page on a web server and then write them to a file by simply going to the URL -address. It works fast enough for our need.

I'm not familiar with IECapt, but it might be something you might want to look at.

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