I am trying to do a very simple web page read from within a 4D database procedure but so far I have not been able to find any examples or anything that gives me the least clue as to how this can be done. The closest I have been able to get is a function named CALL WEB SERVICES that evidently is intended to interface with very specific subsets of web page data such as java applets and forms data but the interface is very rich, not simply described in the documentation and gives the impression that it is so complex that it could not possibly be used for such a simple task. What I want to do is to be able to feed a given URL to a function which will then retrieve the web page and return the HTML text to me for manual parsing. You would think that such a simple case would be the very first example given in the 4D Language documentation but this sure is not the case. There is also a 4D extension called "4D Internet Commands" that looks promising, but while this includes functions for SMTP, POP3 and FTP access, there is no mention of HTTP at all so I have not looked much farther into this information.
My closest workaround has been to use 4D to export an HTML page containing the links I need to read, then to use Netscape to read and save those pages to text files and finally to read those text files back into 4D. While infinitely better than the purely manual copy and paste method I had been using previously, this is still a very klunky way to do things.
If there are any 4D developers out there who can aim me in the right direction on how to do this simple task, I would be very grateful. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.
