The challenge
Staff downloaded hundreds of manuals by hand from a parts portal, then sorted them into folders.
What we built
- Manifest V3 extension that walks the portal's category tree
- Downloads PDFs into folders that mirror the portal categories
- Saved progress so long runs resume where they stopped
The full story
The situation
Staff at an equipment parts distributor downloaded hundreds of manuals one by one from a supplier’s parts portal, then sorted them into folders by hand.
What we built
A Chrome extension (Manifest V3) that works inside the user’s logged-in portal session. It walks the category tree, opens each document, downloads the PDF and saves it into a folder path that mirrors the portal’s categories.
The problem we solved
Early downloads landed in meaningless folders like “Unknown/Parts Portal” because the viewer page didn’t contain the category name. We kept track of the category from the left-hand menu during the crawl and used that to name folders.
Engineering details
- Navigation runs in a content script, and downloads in a background service worker
- Download start and finish are tracked as separate events
- Saved progress lets long runs resume where they stopped