The WebEPG Designer is a stand-alone program that can help design or edit new grabber configurations (grabber files) for WebEPG.

You can use the designer to test elements of your grabber file and most importantly to identify the data for the Template section of the grabber file.

Download the program from here: WebEPG-Designer-v5.zip

How to Use WebEPG Designer

First, open the webpage that contains the program listing for your channel. Right-click on the page and select View Source. Find a detailed program listing. (You can always search for the first program listed to find it.)

Analyze the structure of the program listing. Optionally, to minimize the chance of finding irrelevant data, you can define a "start" and "end" text that appear just before and after the complete program listing, so you can tell WebEPG where to start and stop looking for the program data. Make sure the text strings are unique, do a search on the page to make sure meta headers.

Next identify the data elements you will need for your grabber file. Mainly start time and title, although there may be other options, like description or episode name you can add later if you wish.

Loading Data

Once you have all the data (URL, start and end text, program start and title), run WebEPG Designer and do the following:

1. Enter the URL of the site containing your channel data in the Get box.
2. Optionally enter Start and End text.
3. Press Load to load the page data.

If the data you entered so far is correct, the data for your listings should appear in the Source box.

Finding/Parsing Text for the Grabber Template Text

Find the unique data for one program listing. This is the hard part, you may use either the results from the Source box, or the page source you opened from your webbrowser.

• Copy and paste the code data for one program listing into the Text box.

• Replace the program start time with the code

  <#START>

  (including the

  <

  and

  >

  symbols).

• Replace the program title with the code

  <#TITLE>

  .

• For more codes you can use, consult the Template Text section of the grabber file documentation.
• Enter the Tag type (T, I, A, etc) in the Tags box (see the Section Template tags in the grabber file documentation).
• Press Parse to see if the data is found correctly. Under Index and Source a list of all found program sections should be shown. Select one of the found items, and the data should appear under the Field and Value columns in the lower right box. If not, edit the text in the Text box and try again, or change the Tags used.

Copying Data To Your Grabber File

Once the data is parsed correctly, copy the data from the WebEPG Designer to your grabber file and insert it between the quotes (

"

and

"

):

• URL to the

  <Site url="" post="" external="false" encoding="" />

• Start and End text to

  <Template name="default" start="" end="">

• Template tags to

  <Section Template tags="">

• XML text from the Text box to

  <Template Text>

Make sure you press the Xml button below the Text box before you copy the XML text to the Template Text section of your grabber file. It will convert the HTML data to XML for you.

NOTE: Not all HTML is converted by the Xml button. For example if there are special characters in your template text, you must convert them manually (e.g.

&

to

&

).

Testing Post Data

Most of the grabber files created so far have not needed post data. However, if the website containing your program listings requires data be send to the site, for example to go to a new page for the next day, and that data does not appear in the URL, you may need to use Post in your grabber file. You can use the WebEPG Designer to test and find the correct post format.

First look at the website source data for any

method="post"

code and find the input id or name of the data to be posted.

For example in the case above (new page for next day) the id or name of a method="post" reference might be

schedule_date

. You would enter:

schedule_date=01/01/2008

to see if the data loaded in WebEPG Designer will be for January 1, 2008 (or whatever date and format you need).

Then in the grabber file you can enter

post="schedule_date=[DD]/[MM]/[YYYY]]"

.

Testing and Using Your New Grabber File

For further information on creating, testing and using your new grabber file, see Customizing WebEPG