RoboSuite 6.

openkapow
Quick Start Guide
 openkapow
Quick Start Guide

© 1999-2007 Kapow Technologies

Version: 6.2
Copyright 1999-2007 Kapow Technologies
http://www.kapowtech.com
All rights reserved.
CONTENTS iii

Contents
WELCOME!.............................................................................................. 1
Legal Notice....................................................................................... 1
CREATE AN RSS FEED................................................................................ 2
Step 1 – Start RoboMaker .................................................................... 2
Step 2 – Create New RSS Robot............................................................ 2
Step 3 – Enter URL to Start From .......................................................... 3
Step 4 – Enter Name and Description .................................................... 4
Step 5 – Complete the Wizard .............................................................. 5
Step 6 – Choose Videos Tab ................................................................. 5
Step 7 – Choose Science & Technology .................................................. 7
Step 8 - Loop over Videos .................................................................... 8
Step 9 – Extract Title ........................................................................ 10
Step 10 – Extract URL ....................................................................... 11
Step 11 – Extract Description ............................................................. 12
Step 12 – Try your Robot in the Debugger............................................ 12
Step 13 – Publish the RSS Feed .......................................................... 13
Step 13 – Use Your RSS Feed ............................................................. 14
CREATING A REST WEB SERVICE ............................................................... 16
Step 1 – Start RoboMaker .................................................................. 16
Step 2 – Create a New REST Robot ..................................................... 17
Step 3 – Enter URL to Start From ........................................................ 18
Step 4 – Select Input Values .............................................................. 19
Step 5 – Select Output Values ............................................................ 21
Step 6 – Enter Word ......................................................................... 22
Step 7 – Select Translation Option ...................................................... 23
Step 8 – Click Translate ..................................................................... 25
Step 9 - Extract the Translation .......................................................... 26
Step 10 – Publish the Web Service ...................................................... 27
Step 11 – Try out the Robot ............................................................... 28
CREATING A WEB CLIP ............................................................................ 30
Step 1 – Start RoboMaker .................................................................. 30
Step 2 – Create a New Web Clipping Robot........................................... 31
Step 3 – Enter Start URL ................................................................... 32
Step 4 – Call the Bluff ....................................................................... 33
Step 5 – Add a New Clip Branch.......................................................... 33
Step 6 – Select clip in Call Bluff branch ................................................ 34
Step 7 – Select clip in Default branch .................................................. 37
iv ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

Step 8 – Publish the robot.................................................................. 39

CONCLUSION ......................................................................................... 41
INDEX.................................................................................................. 42
WELCOME! 1

Welcome!
Welcome to openkapow RoboMaker. This quick start guide will help you
getting started writing and publishing robots on openkapow.
The RoboMaker application allows you to create, edit and debug robots.
RoboMaker comes with an extensive online help system, and a comprehensive
user manual.

Legal Notice
In this guide, we refer to the trademarks YouTube, blufr and altavista. This is
nominative use and is not indented as an infringement on the rights of the
trademark owner.
2 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

Create an RSS Feed

The first robot we create will be an RSS robot that lists the 20 most popular
Science & Technology clips on YouTube.

Step 1 – Start RoboMaker

First, start up RoboMaker. You can do this from the Start Menu.

Step 2 – Create New RSS Robot

RoboMaker presents a welcome screen that allows you to select the type of
robot to create. Select Create an RSS feed.

Figure 1: RoboMaker Startup Wizard

CREATE AN RSS FEED 3

Step 3 – Enter URL to Start From

We will start from the http://www.youtube.com page. Enter www.youtube.com
in the text field.

Figure 2: Enter start URL

Click Next or press Enter to continue.
4 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

Step 4 – Enter Name and Description

Next, we will choose a name and description for your RSS feed. The wizard
suggests a name based on the URL you just entered, but in this case we'll
choose another name. Enter Science clips in the Name field, and a short
description in the Description field, e.g. The most viewed science clips on
YouTube. The description is optional.

Figure 3: Enter Name and Description

Click Next to continue.
CREATE AN RSS FEED 5

Step 5 – Complete the Wizard

The wizard will then ask you whether you want your RSS feed to take input
from the user of the feed. We won't do that for this simple wizard.

Figure 4: Finish the Wizard

Select No and click Finish.
This will complete the wizard and create your robot. The newly created robot
will immediately load the start URL you entered (www.youtube.com).

Step 6 – Choose Videos Tab

First of all, a short introduction is in order. What you will notice first is the
browser-like view in the lower-left corner. That is the Page View. It displays
the current page of the robot. The two boxes above are Steps. They define
6 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

your robots interaction with the page. Currently there are only two Steps, so
the robot does little more than load the home page of YouTube.
First, we want the robot to click on the Videos tab on the page. Right-click on
the Videos link and select Click from the right-click menu.

Figure 5: Click on the Videos Tab

This will insert a new Click Step that performs the click.
CREATE AN RSS FEED 7

Step 7 – Choose Science & Technology

Now configure the robot to click on the Science & Technology category in the
left part of the page.

Figure 6: Choose Science & Technology

Right-click on the Science & Technology link and select Click in the right-click
menu. After performing the step, the robot then shows today's most views in
the Science & Technology category.
8 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

Step 8 - Loop over Videos

Now right-click on a free space inside the Most Viewed table, and choose
Loops | For Each Tag Path in the right-click menu.

Figure 7: Right-click in the Most Viewed Table

CREATE AN RSS FEED 9

Then configure the action by entering td in the Tag Path property.

Figure 8: Enter Tag Path

This will loop over all <td> tags in the table.
Insert a new step after this one, by clicking on the icon in the toolbar.

Figure 9: Insert Step after Select Step

10 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

Step 9 – Extract Title

You will notice a blue bounding box in the Page View. This is shown to indicate
the part of the page we are currently iterating over.
To extract the news item title, right-click on the link to the video and choose
Extract Title in the right-click menu.

Figure 10: Extract Title

CREATE AN RSS FEED 11

Step 10 – Extract URL

Right-click again and select Extract URL to extract the URL for the item.

Figure 11: Extract URL

12 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

Step 11 – Extract Description

The last information to extract is a description for the news item. Select the
text below the video to get the description. Notice that it is a little tricky to
select the entire text by click in the page view. Just below the browser view is
the source for the page, which you can click in more easily in this case. Right-
click on the div tag and choose Extract Description.

Figure 12: Extract Description

Step 12 – Try your Robot in the Debugger

Your robot is now done. Now let's take it for a test-run before we publish it.
Click on Open Debugger ( ) to start RoboDebugger and click Run ( ) in the
debugger window.
CREATE AN RSS FEED 13

The results are shown below in the Input/Outputs tab. See the example
result below:

Figure 13: RoboDebugger Results

Step 13 – Publish the RSS Feed

Your service is now done and we have verified it works. Once you deploy the
service, the data will be available will be available as an RSS feed.
Since this may be the first time you publish to openkapow from RoboMaker,
you will have to enter your username and password for the openkapow site.
Choose File | Edit Username and Password ( ).

Figure 14: Enter Username and Password

14 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

You can click on the underlined links to register, if you have not done so
already, or to retrieve your lost password.
Click on Publish to openkapow ( ) to publish the robot. If you have not
entered your username and password yet, the dialog for entering the
username and credentials will appear now (see Figure 14 above). If your user
credentials are valid, the dialog below will appear instead.

Figure 15: Publish on openkapow

Enter a title and a category for your robot to be placed under on openkapow.
You can also enter a description and one or more tags that other users can
use when searching for your service.

Step 13 – Use Your RSS Feed

Using the created RSS feed is straightforward. Copy the robot service URL,
and enter it into your favorite RSS news reader. You can also access the URL
CREATE AN RSS FEED 15

for the RSS feed directly. Most browsers will render the feed reasonable well,
even though it is not HTML.
openkapow will take care to run your robot at regularly scheduled intervals
to update the contents of the feed.
16 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

Creating a REST Web Service

This chapter will help you create your first REST web service. REST-style web
services are a lightweight alternative to SOAP-style web services under some
circumstances.

Step 1 – Start RoboMaker

This is for the benefit of those who have jumped into the quick start guide at
this point. Of course, if RoboMaker is already running, skip this step.
RoboMaker can be started from the Start Menu.
CREATING A REST WEB SERVICE 17

Step 2 – Create a New REST Robot

Choose to create a new REST robot. If you have just started RoboMaker, you
can do that from the startup wizard (see Figure 1 above). Otherwise, you can
choose New ( ) to start the following wizard:

Figure 16: New REST Robot

Click Next or press Enter to continue.
18 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

Step 3 – Enter URL to Start From

We will start from the http://babelfish.altavista.com page. Enter
babelfish.altavista.com in the text field.

Figure 17: Enter Start URL

Click Next or press Enter to continue.
CREATING A REST WEB SERVICE 19

Step 4 – Select Input Values

Select the input values the robot takes. This robot takes only one input value:
The word to translate. Enter word then press Enter.

Figure 18: Enter Input Values

20 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

Click Next or press Enter to continue to the next page. On this page you can
fill out the input values. Enter fish for the word input value.

Figure 19: Fill in Value

Click Next or press Enter to continue.
CREATING A REST WEB SERVICE 21

Step 5 – Select Output Values

The robot should return a translation of the word that was provided as input.
Enter translation, and press Enter.

Figure 20: Enter Output Values

Click Finish or press Enter to create the robot.
22 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

Step 6 – Enter Word

Now the robot has been created, but it is still not configured to handle the
translation. After loading the Babelfish page, the first thing the robot should to
is to enter the word into the text field that contains the word to translate.
Right-click on the text field with the caption "Translate a block of text" and
select Enter Text from Attribute | RESTInput | RESTInput.value1
(word) from the right-click menu.

Figure 21: Enter Word

Notice how the word fish has been entered into the text field.
CREATING A REST WEB SERVICE 23

Step 7 – Select Translation Option

Then select to translate from English to German. Right-click on the selection
box with the text "Select to and from language", and choose Select Option in
the right-click menu.

Figure 22: Select Option

24 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

After doing this, a dialog will appear. Select "English to German" in the drop-
down box.

Figure 23: Select Option Dialog

After this step, the translation option has been set to translate from English to
German. As you may have noticed, it is actually possible to set the value
dynamically, instead of hard-coding it into the robot as we did here. It is
possible to let the user determine what language to translate from and to, by
specifying it as input values.
CREATING A REST WEB SERVICE 25

Step 8 – Click Translate

Make the robot click on the Translate button, by right-clicking on it and
selecting Click on the right-click menu.

Figure 24: Click Translate

Clicking on translate makes the site translate the word from German to
English.
26 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

Step 9 - Extract the Translation

To complete the robot, we must now extract the translation from the page. Do
this by right-clicking on the text box containing the translation and selecting
Extract | Extract Text | RESTOutput | RESTOutput.value1
(translation).

Figure 25: Extract Translated Word

This places the translated word in the output value translation, which is
returned to the caller.
CREATING A REST WEB SERVICE 27

Step 10 – Publish the Web Service

The robot is now complete. Click on Publish to openkapow ( ) to publish
the robot. If you have not entered your username and password yet, the
dialog for entering the username and credentials will appear now (see Figure
14 above). If your user credentials are valid, the dialog above will appear
instead.

Figure 26: Publish REST Robot

28 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

After you have successfully published the robot, the following dialog will
appear:

Figure 27: REST Robot Published

Click on the link to try out the web service.

Step 11 – Try out the Robot

The URL to the newly created web service can now be used to translate words
from English into German. The word to translate is provided as a parameter to
the URL, like this:
http://service.openkapow.com/Translatetogerman.rest?word=road. If you just
the URL without any parameters you will get an HTML page where you can
provide the word parameter.

Figure 28: Web Service Test Page

CREATING A REST WEB SERVICE 29

Enter a value (e.g. road) and click Invoke Service. The robot will take the
input parameter, load the Babelfish page, fill out values, choose the language
option, click on the translate button and extract the translation. It will then
return the result as XML, which will be rendered like this in a browser:

Figure 29: Web Service Result XML

The REST service can format the output in several ways. The XML format is
the default, but it can also return HTML, CSV text, and JSON. Every created
service can return each of these output formats, depending on how it is
invoked. More output formats will be added later, expanding the applicability
of existing services.
30 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

Creating a Web Clip

This chapter will help you create your first web clipping robot, a clip from the
Blufr service.

Step 1 – Start RoboMaker

This is for the benefit of those who have jumped into the quick start guide at
this point. Of course, if RoboMaker is already running, skip this step.
RoboMaker can be started from the Start Menu.
CREATING A WEB CLIP 31

Step 2 – Create a New Web Clipping Robot

Choose to create a new REST robot. If you have just started RoboMaker, you
can do that from the startup wizard (see Figure 1 above). Otherwise, you can
choose New ( ) to start the following wizard:

Figure 30: New web clipping robot

Select “Create a new web clip” and click Next or press Enter to continue.
32 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

Step 3 – Enter Start URL

Now you should see a wizard that looks like this:

Figure 31: Enter Start URL

Enter www.blufr.com in the text field and click Finish.
CREATING A WEB CLIP 33

Step 4 – Call the Bluff

RoboMaker will now open a view of the deployed clip, called the Portlet View.
In the Portlet View, click on either the “Way” or “No Way” button call the bluff.
The robot will then perform the user interaction.

Figure 32: Call the bluff in the Portlet View

After calling the bluff the page will contain the following:

Figure 33: Bluffed!

Step 5 – Add a New Clip Branch

Now we will add a new Clip Branch to handle the results page differently than
the initial page. Click on Add Clip Branch ( ) in the toolbar.

Figure 34: Add Clip Branch

34 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

This will trigger a new dialog window, where you can name the Clip Branch.
Name it Call Bluff, and press Finish.

Figure 35: Name the new clip branch

This will add a few additional steps to the robot.

Step 6 – Select clip in Call Bluff branch

Instead of clipping the entire page, we will now select only part of the page to
clip. To configure the step, click on the Clip step in the Call Bluff branch.

Figure 36: Go to Clip step in Call Bluff branch

CREATING A WEB CLIP 35

Use the mouse and the arrows in the toolbar to select the part of the page to
clip. The selection is shown with red dashed lines. Continue until you have
selected the parts shown below.

Figure 37: Select part to clip

After selecting, go to the End Clip Step in the same branch.

Figure 38: Go to End Clip step in Call Bluff branch

36 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

When this is done, the Portlet View gets focus again, and shows a preview of
the clip:

Figure 39: The selected clip

CREATING A WEB CLIP 37

Step 7 – Select clip in Default branch

First, click on the Restart Session ( ). This will cause the robot to navigate to
the start page. Then select the Clip step in the default branch:

Figure 40: Go to Clip step in Default branch

Then select what to clip in the page view in the lower-left corner. Select items
until you have this:

Figure 41: Select items in th the Default branch

38 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

Click on the End Clip step in the same branch to show how the interactive clip
will look:

Figure 42: The selected clip

CREATING A WEB CLIP 39

Step 8 – Publish the robot

Now the robot is finished, it is time to publish it to openkapow. Click on
Publish to openkapow ( ) to publish the robot. If you have not entered
your username and password yet, the dialog for entering the username and
credentials will appear now (see Figure 14 above). If your user credentials are
valid, the dialog below will appear instead.

Figure 43: Publish dialog

Fill out the dialog. Start by entering a title. The URL will contain your
username and a short string derived from the title. You must also choose a
category. When you are ready, publish the robot to openkapow.
40 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

After the robot has been uploaded, the following dialog will be displayed:

Figure 44: Published dialog

CONCLUSION 41

Conclusion
You can get more information on the openkapow site, at
http://www.openkapow.com. You can also read the RoboMaker User's Guide
that is included in the RoboMaker installation.
42 ROBOSUITE OPENKAPOW QUICK START GUIDE

Index
starting, 12
P RoboMaker, 1
password, 14 starting, 2, 17, 31
publishing robots, 13, 15 rss robot, 2

R U
RoboDebugger, 12 username, 14