Web Pages

[Greg]

This is a general question.

Each month we receive an invoice(s) from suppliers over the Internet. We
use the information provided to us and enter the information into a desktop
Access 2002 application through forms provided with the Access application.
Some of the data of interested is non fixed within the invoice (page). The
information is manipulated, reviewed, and the invoice is paid if all is OK.

Is there any way to propagate the necessary Access tables with the invoice
data without reentering the information from scratch?

Any information you can provide regarding the feasibility and reasonableness
is greatly appreciated.

Also any information regarding reference material or products would be
appreciated.

Some providers can provide our invoice information via CD but the suppliers
I am addressing in this message can not.

Thank You,
Greg

 

[Dirk Goldgar]

This is a general question.

Each month we receive an invoice(s) from suppliers over the
Internet. We use the information provided to us and enter the
information into a desktop Access 2002 application through forms
provided with the Access application. Some of the data of interested
is non fixed within the invoice (page). The information is
manipulated, reviewed, and the invoice is paid if all is OK.

Is there any way to propagate the necessary Access tables with the
invoice data without reentering the information from scratch?

Any information you can provide regarding the feasibility and
reasonableness is greatly appreciated.

Also any information regarding reference material or products would be
appreciated.

Some providers can provide our invoice information via CD but the
suppliers I am addressing in this message can not.

Do I understand correctly that the invoices your talking about are
presented to you on a web page? Or are they e-mailed to you, or
delivered by some other "internet" medium?

You can certainly get the content of the web pages in one form or
another, and then parse it programmatically. However, if the
information you need is present in a free format, it's going to be
harder to parse it out. It probably will not be impossible, but it will
take more complex programming than just extracting it from a table on
the web page. We'd need to see examples of the various invoice formats
to know how easy or hard parsing them is likely to be. I don't know if
you can post samples here or not, though.

 

[Greg]

Dirk,
Thank you..
Our service provider sends us an Email when an Invoice is ready to be
reviewed and paid.
We then go to our service providers Web site and use a Password to access
our Invoice online via the Internet. This is a secure connection. We then
navigate to the Month and Invoice we need and begin transcribing data from
the Invoice to Excel and then to Access. I guess the answer to you first
Question is that this is a web page. I am not at liberty to post actual
samples of the invoices.

Are there any tools to assist in parsing.?
I do not know if the page we receive is HTML or XML if that makes a
difference (does it?)

Thanks,
Greg

 

[Dirk Goldgar]

I am not at liberty to post actual samples of the invoices.

I was afraid of that.

Are there any tools to assist in parsing.?
I do not know if the page we receive is HTML or XML if that makes a
difference (does it?)

A program can probably parse the plain text, if necessary, but it would
probably be more reliable to parse XML or structured HTML, since at
least some of the logical structure of the invoice is likely to be
represented in the tagged structure.

I don't know if there are general-purpose tools for this, but you could
try searching the web for such. Another thing you might try is asking
the service provider if they have a way to accomplish this. You're
probably not the only customer of theirs with this need. Or, they may
have a "download invoice" function that would get you the data in a more
database-friendly format.