Manual XPaths
The Manual XPath feature allows you to select data from the element of the website itself. The button to do this is located in the top right hand of a column that you are training. Clicking "Manual XPath" from this button will cause a bar to appear underneath the column headings where you can enter your own specified XPath.
Why would I want to do this?
If the data you want to extract from a page is hidden behind a drop down menu, not fully visible on the webpage, or otherwise not selectable in the extractor, it is still possible to extract if it appears in the HTML.
Show me an Example
https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/178381309/engagement-ring-box-proposal-box-ring?ref=hp_so_crsl_l
This item on etsy.com has two prices that can be selected by clicking on a drop down menu. Imagine you want to capture them both.
In the extractor, it is not possible to click on the dropdown and the select each piece of data individually, but you can see from the HTML that the data is there, so go to the drop down box and press (right click > inspect):
As shown above this will bring up an element box, however we don't need to worry about most of the information here, instead just look for the data you want to find. You may need to open and close a few boxes using the little arrows in the element box. When you find the data you are are looking for right click it and select copy, copy XPath. Now paste the XPath into the white box that has appeared in the middle of the screen when you clicked the manual XPath button as shown at the beginning of this page.
In short, this XPath is telling the extractor to: Find any attribute called "name" that contains the value "listing"; then look for the data that lives in the element called "option"; but ignore the first item.
When entered in the box, the corresponding data will appear in the column.
Sometimes no data will appear, there are two reason this can happen. First, there is Io, in the box, this can sometimes be caused by the extractor. If you cannot work out what to delete you can inspect the page on your regular browser and then copy it into Import.io. The second reason is that it is HTML data in this case needs to be changed to the data table to output HTML.
For more information on manual XPath visit this site.