a simple way to use real time data to populate a form.

If you go to real clear politics

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/president/

You will see that there’s all the latest polls with a spread in the right hand column. Create a program wherein the user types in a candidate (we’ll assume the user

types in the candidates name correctly), and the program outputs the latest spread for

that particular candidate. For example the September 23rd Spread for the Democratic

Presidential Nomination is Clinton +8. So if a user types in Clinton, it will output 8.

And that’s it! First thing, How do we get this number from the webpage? If you right click

on the webpage you can “View the source” of the page. You’ll see HTML code. Search

for “Clinton +” (i.e. Find Clinton + on the webpage). You will see that it finds the first

Clinton + and the number right after it is the spread we want (Spreads are always nonnegative

because someone is in the lead)! In fact the number is in between Clinton +

and <.

"">Clinton +8</span>

uneditable text box

editable text box,

i.e. user writes

 

Clinton, or Trump

button that if user

clicks the bottom

text box gets

populated with 8.

In visual basic you can get the whole webpage html as a string using the following

command:

!Dim!sourceString!As!String!=!New!System.Net.WebClient().DownloadString("http://

www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/president/")

In visual basic you can split a string by using the Split command.

if I had a string panther=“Panther Pride Week” and I Split on the spaces like so

Dim!fun!As!String()!=!Split(panther,!"!")

After this command fun will be a string array with “Panther” as its first element “Pride” as

its second element and “Week” as its third element. For example if we MsgBox(fun(0))

we’d see “Panther”.

So back to our Visual Basic. The user puts in a candidates name in the text box. We

look at the textbox’s text to figure out who the candidate is. Then we can use Split a few

times to find the number between “<candidates name, i.e. Clinton or Trump or Sanders>

+” and the “<“.

Split once and then split again...

Finally we write this out to the text box and Bam-- we have our first Real Time Visual

Basic Application!

This GUI is very bare bones. The functionality is basic. To get full points you should do

one of the side quests (extra credit for the harder ones):

Side Quests:

1) The GUI isn’t the best. Make the GUI more presentable and add another function

(like a dropdown menu that preloads the candidate names, labels for all the text

boxes, or maybe a Toolbar with buttons of 3 or 4 candidates faces on it that I can

select)

2) The information of the candidate spread is devoid of Date or the the Race/Topic

column information. Read these off the website and Incorporate one or both of these

pieces into the GUI (extra credit)

3) Allow the User to also Pick one Topic, From a Dropdown menu (i.e. Iowa or

Democratic Presidential Nomination or Republican Presidential Nomination), in

addition to a candidate and only give the Spread of that contest (extra credit)

4) Anything else that you might find interesting (Toolbar with candidates pictures I can

select instead of typing? Right Click that does something? Tooltips on all the

elements? Main menu?). Be as creative as you want, but make a clear argument that

your addition improved the deliverable in some way-- If you go this route you might

want to include a ReadMe.