Apple

On Apr 26, 2009, at 5:54 AM, Wassim Jabi wrote:

I would like to use Automator to automatically download multiple PDF files that are published daily and stored according to the date of publication. The format for the URL is as follows:

http://www.somesite.com/issue/YYYY/MM/DD/X.pdf   where

YYYY = Year (e.g. 2009)
MM    = 2-digit Month (e.g. 08)
DD   = 2-digit Day (e.g. 24)
X = pagenumber (e.g. 1)

Example: http://www.somesite.com/issue/2009/04/25/1.pdf

Ideally, I would like Automator to ask me for a date (and fill in today's date as a default in the above format) and ask for how many pages to download. Then to loop through the number of pages and download the PDFs to pre-specified folder on my Mac.

Any pointers on how to do this?

You can use workflow variables in Automator to get dates and format them a certain way. You can also perform basic looping using the "Loop" action. However, the overall workflow you've described is likely a bit too complex for Automator without utilizing something like AppleScript to help. My suggestion would be to write a script to build the URLs, and then use the "Run AppleScript" action to run the script and pass the URLs down to the "Download URLs" action.

For example, here's a start to a script...

set theBaseURL to "http://www.somesite.com/issue"

set theYear to "2009"

set theMonth to "04"

set theDay to "25"

set theNumberOfPages to 5

set theURLs to {}

repeat with a from 1 to theNumberOfPages

set end of theURLs to theBaseURL & "/" & theYear & "/" & theMonth & "/" & theDay & "/" & a & ".pdf"

end repeat

return theURLs

--> {"http://www.somesite.com/issue/2009/04/25/1.pdf", "http://www.somesite.com/issue/2009/04/25/2.pdf", "http://www.somesite.com/issue/2009/04/25/3.pdf", "http://www.somesite.com/issue/2009/04/25/4.pdf", "http://www.somesite.com/issue/2009/04/25/5.pdf"}

This would need to be modified to prompt you for the date, or you'd need to adjust it in the action each time you run the workflow.

Hope this helps.

-Ben

Ben Waldie

President

Automated Workflows, LLC

610.935.0652

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