Web Crawling (Ajax/JavaScript enabled pages) using java

Question

I am very new to this web crawling. I am using crawler4j to crawl the websites. I am collecting the required information by crawling these sites. My problem here is I was unable to crawl the content for the following site. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1568494612005741. I want to crawl the following information from the aforementioned site (Please take a look at the attached screenshot).

If you observe the attached screenshot it has three names (Highlighted in red boxes). If you click one of the link you will see a popup and that popup contains the whole information about that author. I want to crawl the information which are there in that popup.

I am using the following code to crawl the content.

public class WebContentDownloader {

private Parser parser;
private PageFetcher pageFetcher;

public WebContentDownloader() {
    CrawlConfig config = new CrawlConfig();
    parser = new Parser(config);
    pageFetcher = new PageFetcher(config);
}

private Page download(String url) {
    WebURL curURL = new WebURL();
    curURL.setURL(url);
    PageFetchResult fetchResult = null;
    try {
        fetchResult = pageFetcher.fetchHeader(curURL);
        if (fetchResult.getStatusCode() == HttpStatus.SC_OK) {
            try {
                Page page = new Page(curURL);
                fetchResult.fetchContent(page);
                if (parser.parse(page, curURL.getURL())) {
                    return page;
                }
            } catch (Exception e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
    } finally {
        if (fetchResult != null) {
            fetchResult.discardContentIfNotConsumed();
        }
    }
    return null;
}

private String processUrl(String url) {
    System.out.println("Processing: " + url);
    Page page = download(url);
    if (page != null) {
        ParseData parseData = page.getParseData();
        if (parseData != null) {
            if (parseData instanceof HtmlParseData) {
                HtmlParseData htmlParseData = (HtmlParseData) parseData;
                return htmlParseData.getHtml();
            }
        } else {
            System.out.println("Couldn't parse the content of the page.");
        }
    } else {
        System.out.println("Couldn't fetch the content of the page.");
    }
    return null;
}

public String getHtmlContent(String argUrl) {
    return this.processUrl(argUrl);
}
}

I was able to crawl the content from the aforementioned link/site. But it doesn't have the information what I marked in the red boxes. I think those are the dynamic links.

• My question is how can I crawl the content from the aforementioned link/website...???
• How to crawl the content from Ajax/JavaScript based websites...???

Please can anyone help me on this.

Thanks & Regards, Amar

Answer 1

Hi I found the workaround with the another library. I used Selinium WebDriver (org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver) library to extract the dynamic content. Here is the sample code.

public class CollectUrls {

private WebDriver driver;

public CollectUrls() {
    this.driver = new FirefoxDriver();
    this.driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(30, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
}

protected void next(String url, List<String> argUrlsList) {
    this.driver.get(url);
    String htmlContent = this.driver.getPageSource();
}

Here the "htmlContent" is the required one. Please let me know if you face any issues...???

Thanks, Amar