htmldelphiwebtwebbrowser

Send and receive data to and from a website using the TWebbrowser component in Delphi

I'm creating a VCL Application with Delpi 10.3 and want to support some web functionality by having the user enter the ISBN of a book into a TEdit component and from there passing/sending this value to a search field on this website: https://isbnsearch.org after which the website looks up the ISBN and displays the Author of the book. I want to somehow access the information (i.e Author) presented by the search result and again use it in my application.

This is my GUI, for a better idea of what I want to accomplish:

enter image description here

What code can I use for this? Any other feasible suggestions or approaches are acceptable.

Solution

  • When performing a search on that website, it simply loads a page with a specific URL query string...

    https://isbnsearch.org/search?s=suess

    The above example is when I search for "suess", so you can easily concatenate a search URL.

    You can use any HTTP component, such as TIdHTTP, to load this search page, then use an HTML parser to scrape the page and read what you need. Much, much easier than trying to read through the TWebBrowser.

    enter image description here

    In the end, you won't actually display the HTML (I mean you can if you want to), but the idea is to read the data and display it in your own format.

    On that specific page, start by locating the ul element with id searchresults. Then, each li element contains individual results. Unfortunately, this website uses pagination, and only shows 10 results per page. To do this, call this page again with another parameter &p=2 for the 2nd page, &p=3 for the 3rd page, and so on.

    On the other hand, that is the worst way to acquire such information. What you should be doing is using a proper API which gives you machine-friendly data. The service you are referencing doesn't appear to have an option, but here's an example of one which does:

    https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/books - this also appears to provide you MUCH more information than the one you're using.