Capture specific website node as image (with login and on a schedule)

Question

We use a cookie cutter ERP that is 100% web/cloud. It is great for the most part but they do not offer any customizations.

It has a calendar that shows when orders are due to ship. We want to display this info on a large screen but we have several issues.

• You have to be logged in
• The screen is highly cluttered making the calendar small

The website defaults to a monthly view but we want it to show the weekly layout.

Using Edge's developer tools, I was able to find the specific node that calls out only the calendar. I was also able to find the variable that changed it to a weekly view. What I would like to be able to do is simply capture this specific node on a timer, save it as a jpg, and display it on a large TV.

Any ideas or pre-built solutions you are aware of that allow screen caps of specific nodes and saves them to a specified file?

Answer 1

Hi,

I would suggest a little different approach. Instead of trying to capture a portion of a web page as an image, I would instead fetch the calendar data and then use this data to render the calendar on your large TV. In this way, you can scale up the fonts as needed for readability, change the layout some (if needed), etc.

For example, a script would run periodically to retrieve the weekly calendar data, and then a Static Site Generator (SSG)(Hugo, Jekyll, Next.js, etc.) would be used to automatically render an html page that the large TV PC would be set up to automatically display on its web browser. The page would have code to automatically refresh itself so when changes are posted they would show up.

Or if you didn't want to bother with an SSG you could have the script itself create the html page.

How difficult it is to retrieve the data from the ERP will of course depend on how that ERP is designed. Worst case you could scrape the data from the html page and then use it to render the calendar.

If the above is useful please click Accept Answer.

Thanks.

-TP