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titus.hanke titus.hanke is offline
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Default Web Query with looping variables in the URL

Hi all, I am hoping that somebody can help me with my problem bcause
have been trying for weeks to get this done and am failing because o
my lack of knowledge of VB. Here is what I intend to do...

For a student project, I want to analyze a set of given hotels an
their rates published. The Global Distrubion Systems (GDS) that contai
those published rates are used by several e-commerce websites t
display the rates to the online-customer. One of those sites is:

*http://www.available-rooms.com*

with the hotel search engine he

http://res.available-rooms.com/nexre...wer_search.cgi

When inserting the search options (arrival date, departure date, hote
name and location), the result is a page such as this:

<br /
<bWarning</b: mysql_pconnect(): Lost connection to MySQL serve
during query in <b/home/sites/site15/web/db_connect.php</b on lin
<b3</b<br /
<br /
<bFatal error</b: Call to undefined function: mysqlerror() i
<b/home/sites/site15/web/db_connect.php</b on line <b3</b<br /


Notice that the URL carries ALL the information needed for the query:

- the hotel id number
- the arrival date
- the departure date
- number of guests
- the desired currency (in this case Euros)

In the search results, something like this appears:

WCT Call Center Discount Rates!

Total Rate: $749.39 USD
Rate Plan: WCT Call Center Discount Rate
Room Type: Deluxe Room with 2 Twins or 1 King Bed
$749.39 USD
(614.49 EUR)
Nightly Rate Book Now

The information I want to extract with the Excel web query is:

$749.39 USD
Deluxe Room with 2 Twins or 1 King Bed

=========================

This information should be queried for different date patterns though
so the URL should contain variables for the arrival and departur
dates, where the departure date is always arrival +2 days.

Example:

doa_dd=22&doa_mm=09
doa_dd=23&doa_mm=09
doa_dd=24&doa_mm=09
....
doa_dd=30&doa_mm=09

(DOA_DD = Date of Arrival_Day; DOA_MM = Date of Arrival_Month)

THERE IS a pretty good attempt already to be found he
http://www.willowsolutions.com/tips/tips_2002_08.shtml

The problem is that with my lack of VB, I am not capable of modifyin
the code to my requirements...

In the long, long, long end of the process, I would ideally want
table structured something like this:

ArrivalDate Hotel 1 Hotel 2


22/09 EUR 499,00 EUR 437,00
23/09 EUR 479,00 EUR 429,00
24/09 EUR 499,00 EUR 399,00
25/09 EUR 519,00 EUR 478,00

..the whole thing for 5-10 hotels, to get a good picture for m
project... The date ranges should be somehow inputtable without to muc
difficulty (another sheet with all the dates arrival dates would b
perfectly fine...).

Anyway, I hope to have expressed myself somehow clearly and I do hop
that somebody has the time to read my huge post here !!! Thanks i
advance for anybody who can help me with my project as I am reall
getting desparate!!!

Regards, Titus

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