Parent and child tasks

What are a parent task and a child task?

In Octoparse, you can associate more than 2 tasks and less than 100 tasks together by the field of URL in the extracted field, meaning the previous task can provide URLs for the next task. The task which provides the URL is called a parent task, while the task which uses the URLs from a parent task is called a child task.

How to set up the child task?

There are two methods to set up the child task, depending on whether a child task is ready or not.

1. If the child task is ready:

• Click the Loop Item box
• Click the Edit button next to the Manual Input box

• On the following page, choose Import from task
• Select the right parent task
• Select the correct data field in the parent task (which contains URLs)
• Click Save to save the settings

Then you have successfully transferred URLs from a parent task into a child task.

2. If the child task is not ready:

• Click the  +New button at the sidebar on the Octoparse home screen
• Choose Custom Task

When you are on the setting page, repeat the same steps in method 1.

• Choose Import from task
• Select the right parent task
• Select the correct data field in the parent task (which contains URLs)
• Click Save to save the settings

If the parent task doesn't have any result yet, there will be a notification as Invalid URLs found. Please make sure you have run the parent task before setting the child task.