NCrawler Examples/guides

Question

Can anybody please direct me towards any examples/guides that demosntrates NCrawler usage, i looked into NCrawler Codeplex page but couldn't find any detailed examples.

I'm trying to use NCrawler to create a product price monitoring tool across 5 different sites. My strategy is to download all the price information and then look for any changes daily for each site.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The official getting started samples are here: Getting Started with NCrawler

This should be enough for you to get started, but definitely doesn't show anything "detailed" as you requested.

Unfortunately, as with most open source projects, the documentation is lacking. There isn't a lot you can do except dive in and figure it out, after all it is open source (or look for a commercial solution with better support available).

There is an article on MSDN but only in chinese. So if you don't speak chinese you can translate it like this: Chinese MSDN article for NCrawler translated to English The article does include a downloadable sample project that is available at the time I'm posting this which might be closer to what you are looking for. But again, English was not the target language for this tutorial.

One of the original author/coordinators of this library even suggested NCrawler here on stackoverflow in the past, but hasn't been seen on stackoverflow in around 10-11 months. This timeframe is also reflected in the project's activity on codeplex which shows a bit of a slow down in the last year or so (compared to previous years).

I'd suggest you start with what you do have (the getting started snippets and the translated tutorial) and then when you get stuck post a more specific question regarding NCrawler with your source code as you have implemented it. You will likely get some help with specific code issues that your stackoverflow peers can review.

You might also get some attention from the original author if you have a specific and pointed question that doesn't require him to spend hours and hours writing exhaustive tutorials. There is contact information for the developer on the codeplex page.