Multiple browsers?
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Hi, I'm new here. Looking into OpenRPA for a pilot at the University of Groningen. I have a simple process. I need to access a record from a web application one-by-one, pick a student number from the screen and copy it into another web application. My first issue is that I can open a web-browser, but then it waits to close before going into the second browser to open the other application. Then I tried a parallel step to open two browsers, but same issue. What is here the best approach?
Best regards,
Albert -
Just taking a quick stab at this without too much thinking: I would probably use two tabs instead of two browsers.
OpenURL activity followed by another OpenURL activity.
Both have the "NewTab" property set to True. Browser property set to "chrome.exe" (or whatever floats your boat
Then use the recorder to click on the tab of the first tab, click on the field to scrape, the buttons to click and so on.
Depending on what type the actual field is you might get a different response from the recorder. Like, if the student number that you are scraping happens to be a input field, like a textfield, then the recorder tries to be smart and think you are entering text, and prompt you with a dialog box to enter some text. However, just push ESC button in that case.
If the field you are trying to scrape is not an input field then the recorder will add a click event inside the GetElement. Just delete it.
GetElement has now captured the value in the "item" variable.
After recording, you might need to tweak the selectors a bit, in order to make it more dynamic, fluid like, quite possibly you will need different selector strings for different students and so on.
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@benny-mildh
Thank you! That worked. Is there any chance to speedup things? The first tab comes up with the site, then I have to wait for over 10 seconds (was almost giving up) then the second tab appeared.Best regards,
Albert -
@albert-dren Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. Nothing should take that long to load. It's 2021 dammit!
Anyhoo, It should not take that long. Perhaps just start with a test flow, two openurl activities, testing with a couple of popular sites, does it still take that long? I made a testflow and on my machine it is almost instant.
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@benny-mildh lol. No, both sites have good response, as they are both from the university. I have them in sequence btw, not parallel. Not sure if that has anything to do with it
Might be something else, as if I click in the browser while recording I get a plugin error thingie. Perhaps I'll reinstall, just to be sure. Thnx again.Best regards,
Albert -
@albert-drent Maybe the plugin is not enabled? Last time I installed the plugin from UiPath (same same but different), the plugin was installed but not enabled/activated in the browser settings.
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Hey, I though I would add my view as well.
So the main idea is you can control a tab in a browser, not many, but there is a tricks you can use, to swap between tabs. When using nm, for instance chrome, if you look at the selector i will have an url in the top. every time you use get element it will see if it can find a tab with a url that marches the beginning of that url ( so if the selector url says https://mysite.com/shop and a browser has https://mysite.com/shop/basket/55 open, it will swap to this tab )
but generally I would not advise to try and control two tabs, it just gets to messy and hard to control.
The obvious thing would to just "grab all the data" you need from site one, then loop that data and use it on site two
If that is not doable, then maybe use two different browser, ( for instance IE and chrome )
