Aggregation Studio Overview
On the surface, bank and other financial institute’s web sites appear quite similar, however, a closer look reveals a plethora of HTML programming methods, data formats and other nuances that could make data extraction from them a nightmarish task. This is where BMAggregator and the BMidas Studio come in.

The BMidas Studio is an all-in-one visual toolkit for adding banks and other data sources to BMAggregator. The studio's friendly wizards enable non-programmers to easily record navigation to all pages of the web site and teach BMAggregator to analyze the data and store it in the relevant database records and fields.

BMidas Studio is also the key to prompt and effective support of the system once it is on the way. The studio can easily re-record a single page and incorporate it into the bank’s update procedure.

BMidas Studio Components

DBSchema Builder – The first step in building a BMAggregator based system is to define the Database schema for storing all the data retrieved from the web sites. The DBSchema Builder is the tool for quickly and accurately defining this schema.

Site Recorder Wizard - This wizard guides the user through the various steps of recording a session to the bank’s web site, including logging in, getting the account list, accessing the various data pages, retrieving relevant data from the pages - whatever form it is in, and logging out. The Site Recorder Wizard uses BMidas’s proprietary AutoParse technology to recognize the data tables in the pages and primarily link table columns to database fields.

XSL Editor – This handy tool is used for creating an XSL file that transforms the data from the format it came in to the format defined in the database. The user graphically draws lines from the page format to the database format while utilizing an arsenal of powerful data conversion tools (should they be needed) to assure data from all various data sources is entered into the database in a unified format.

Script Builder - The Script Builder is a graphical tool used for incorporating the products of the previous steps into a complete component for retrieving all data from the web data source. In most cases the Script Builder makes this task trivial, yet it is still powerful enough to deal with even the most complex cases. In the product support stage the Script Builder makes it easy to substitute small parts of the entire script had they been changed.

Functions Editor – Throughout the process various data conversion and handling functions are available for the user to use in order to handle the endless formats banks use to display data. These functions are based on the vast experience BMidas has with pages from all over the world. However, the unexpected can always be expected, so the Functions Editor enables easy incorporation of new functions into the various components of the BMidas Studio.

For inquiries, please write to info@bmidas.com or contact our offices.