#browser automation

You know that moment when you’re building something with an AI coding assistant and you think, “I really wish it could just *look* at the webpage”? That’s the itch. And after months of scratching it with hacky workarounds — screenshots piped through base64, Chrome DevTools protocols that break every third Tuesday, headless browsers that get flagged by every anti-bot system on the internet — I…

When it comes to choosing a test automation framework, you can choose either jest or mocha. however, of the browser automation frameworks we took a look at, you'll require to decide between selenium webdriver and puppeteer. if you desire a quickly, all-in-one solution, cypress.io is the very best option. now that we've presented you with the research study, all you require to do is choose an alternative and start. as soon as you put the pieces in place and start writing test code, the rest is easy.

Web Testing Automation Tools

automation replaces human operate in repetitive, tedious tasks, and decreases the variety of errors. with the ideal automation tools it is possible to automate browser tasks, web testing, and online data extraction, to fill forms, scrape data, transfer data in between applications, and generate reports.

health centers with data processes, realty companies with changing listings, and anybody with order entry or the need to find and utilize data, all count on automation tools to perform essential functions and stay competitive.

Ibm rational functional tester is a test automation tool designed for testing of applications that are developed utilizing different languages and technologies such as web,. net, java, visual basic, siebel, sap, powerbuilder, adobe flex, and dojo toolkit. it is likewise a data-driven testing platform for functional and regression testing.

rft offers a feature called 'storyboard testing' which helps visualize and edit tests using natural language and application screenshots. rft's scriptassure ability permits testers to generate test scripts durable to changes in the interface of the aut. rft can likewise incorporate with other ibm's application lifecycle management tools, such as ibm rational team concert and rational quality supervisor.

Web browser automation is a process where particular steps in the web browser are carried out repetitively to ensure the right operation of the web application's functionality. it might be looked for qa testing in the development process and for control over information system ease of access and performance throughout implementation. the second becomes increasingly more important since current market trends indicate that simply having a good service is not enough; the service should also be highly available and effective. with web browser automation tools it is possible to check ease of access and performance by periodically running some transaction scenarios for specific services.

Trustworthy browser automation and form-filling is a crucial component in all web automation jobs. watch seeshell filling out forms: with seeshell form filling and the scripting api you can use it to automate a very varied set of business process automation (bpo) tasks. seeshell is utilized in complex jobs like 

data entry

accounts payable automation

declares processing automation

The seeshell browser has the google chrome core inside (chromium). so it is fully suitable with any modern website. the automation is visual, so there is no new scripting language to learn, you have full programmatic control over the web browser, and even the most complex tasks can be scripted.

Test Web App Functionality 

Web browser automation is a process where certain steps in the web browser are performed repetitively to ensure the proper operation of the web application's functionality. it may be obtained qa testing in the development process and for control over information system ease of access and performance during implementation. the second becomes increasingly more important considering that current market trends show that simply having a good service is not enough; the service must also be highly accessible and efficient. with web browser automation tools it is possible to check ease of access and performance by periodically running some deal scenarios for particular services.

Whether youre a software developer or simply running numerous high-performing, application-rich websites, browser automation is swiftly becoming one of the most searched for ways to check different site procedures and codes. as web-based technology develops and becomes more dynamic, the requirement for dynamic testing services grows. while there are lots of ways to test the functionality of your website and applications, browser automation offers a means of carrying out such tasks without the requirement for manual adjustment. ultimately, browser automation tools and techniques save web designers hours in time and labor costs.

Choosing a Test Automation Framework 

When it pertains to choosing a test automation framework, you can choose either jest or mocha. however, of the browser automation frameworks we took a look at, you'll need to choose between selenium webdriver and puppeteer. if you desire a quickly, all-in-one solution, cypress.io is the best option. now that we've presented you with the research, all you require to do is select a choice and get going. when you put the pieces in place and start composing test code, the rest is easy.

Navigating to the Website 

Navigating a website to publish files, download files, and enter or extract data is one of the primary uses for an rpa tool. having the ability to transfer to a chosen control, scroll down a page, or figure out which links to click is all part of the process of recording website navigation steps that need to be completed. when recognized, automation steps are participated in a cohesive and constant automation process that is repeatable every day.

iMacros WebBrowser Component for.NET 

Available for purchase as a separate product, the imacros webbrowser component for.net makes it easy to rapidly add web automation to your applications. you also get a proven technology that has been tested and debugged for more than ten years and is utilized in over 500,000 setups with royalty free circulation. learn more.

Web Testing Automation Tools

Selenium is the household name when it concerns test automation. it is thought about the industry standard for interface automation testing of web applications. almost 9 out of ten testers are using or have actually ever utilized selenium in their projects, according to survey on test automation challenges. for developers and testers who have experience and skills in programming and scripting, selenium offers versatility that is hidden in numerous other test automation tools and frameworks. users can write test scripts in many differents languages (such as java, groovy, python, c#, php, ruby, and perl) that work on multiple system environments (windows, mac, linux) and browsers (chrome, firefox, ie, and headless browsers).

automation replaces human work in repetitive, tedious tasks, and reduces the variety of errors. with the best automation tools it is possible to automate browser tasks, web testing, and online data extraction, to fill forms, scrape data, transfer data in between applications, and generate reports. health centers with data procedures, real estate business with changing listings, and anybody with order entry or the requirement to find and utilize data, all rely on automation tools to perform important functions and stay competitive.

Complete web forms 

The chromium browser automation is a simple extension for your browser. it's a full-featured automation tool that assists you prevent repetitive activities. it can assist you automate simple activities like completing forms while still being complex adequate to support scripting and injection. some of its major functions: record: here you can record activities you are currently carrying out on your web browser. record in this sense does not indicate a screen recording. it means that the extension shops all your interactions with the websites.

Watir (pronounced water), is an open-source (bsd), household of ruby libraries for automating web browsers. it allows you to write tests that are easier to read and keep. it is straightforward and versatile. watir drives browsers the exact same method people do. it clicks links, completes forms, presses buttons. watir likewise examines results, such as whether anticipated text appears on the page.

Browser Automation Utilizing Selenium 

The primary step in web browser automation is to locate the elements online page that we want to interact with, like a button, input, dropdown list, etc.

the selenium representation of such html elements is the webelement. like webdriver the webelement is likewise a java interface. as soon as we acquire a webelement we can perform any operation on them that an end user can do, like clicking, typing, selecting, etc.

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VBA: Multithreaded browser automation (VBA Web Scraping)

Web Scraping is very useful for getting the information you need directly off websites. Sometimes however simple browser automation is not enough in terms of performance. Having created both the IE and Parallel classes I decided to jump an opportunity of creating a simple example of how mulithreaded browser automation can be achieved. Daniel Ferry achieved the same here. However, he used VBscript and a lot of coding was required to manage the swarm, as he called it. What I wanted to show you is rather an example how you can combine the Parallel class and the IE class to achieve the same functionality but in a much more concise and easy to manage way. So let’s jump straight in.

What does it do?

The browser automation procedure queries the Google page and copies the first resulting link text to the Excel workbook. In the mulithreaded example a “swarm” of 4 threads (or more if needed) is maintained to carry out simultaneous Google queries. This way the overall execution time is significantly reduced as more IE browser objects are created when some of them are waiting for a callback.

A multithreaded browser automation example

Multithreaded browser automation: Video

Instead of going into the details I encourage you to watch this short video example of a single and mulithreaded IE automation example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBcT51WDGik

Download

Feel free to download the workbook here:

Excel: Multithreaded IE automation365 downloads

Next steps

Check out the deterministic IE automation class here: EXCEL: Simple class for using IE automation in VBA

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EXCEL: Simple class for browser automation in VBA

browser automation (using Microsoft’s Web Browser) is not an easy task in VBA. Excel is certainly a great tool for building your web automation scripts but at every corner you find some obstacles. For me the most challenging was always the nondeterministic state of the IE browser control whenever waiting for it to finish loading/refreshing a website.

The problem

Most browser automation code out there includes the following lines of code whenever waiting for the Internet Explorer browser control to finish loading or refreshing:

While (objIE.Busy Or objIE.READYSTATE <> READYSTATE.READYSTATE_COMPLETE) DoEvents Wend 'The row below may sometimes raise an error! Set element = objIE.Document.GetElementById(id)

The problem is, however, that although IE might state that it has fully loaded the web page this in fact does not always have to be the case and some code might generate errors at random lines of code.

The solution

One way of going around this problem is using arbitrary delays – leveraging Application.OnTime / Application.Wait / Sleep. This workaround, although somewhat useful, in most cases will be unsatisfactory as still does not guarantee that you will actually be able to access a web element or click a button that simply might not be loaded yet due to some JavaScript running in the background. So how to solve this issue?

My answer? Wait until the element appears accessible. See an example function below that will wait until the element is accessible on the web page and only then will it return it.

Public Function GetElementById(id As String, Optional isBlocking As Boolean) 'id: id of the html element; isBlocking: is the code to be blocked until the element is found Dim timeout As Long On Error Resume Next TryAgain: Set GetElementById = objIE.Document.GetElementById(id) If IIf(IsMissing(isBlocking), True, isBlocking) And _ (Err.Number <> 0 Or (GetElementById Is Nothing)) And _ timeout < maxTimeout Then Err.Clear: DoEvents: Sleep 5: timeout = timeout + 5 GoTo TryAgain End If If (GetElementById Is Nothing) Then Err.Raise vbObjectError + ElementNotFoundError, "IE.GetElementById" End Function

So will the original code above change? Not too much really when we use this new function:

While (objIE.Busy Or objIE.READYSTATE <> READYSTATE.READYSTATE_COMPLETE) DoEvents Wend 'This will wait maxTimeout miliseconds until raising an error or return Set element = GetElementById(id)

The code above waits for the element with id to appear accessible on the web page. The 5 millisecond Sleep interval is simply there so we are able to specify an upper threshold for an error to appear on a web page (10 seconds). This threshold is there to prevent us from waiting for an infinite period of time in case the web page crashed etc. This I believe is an honest way out of this conundrum.

A simple class for deterministic browser automation

Browser automation requires usually a lot of coding and in order to provide the deterministic automation we need we would need to encapsulate more procedures for getting elements by id, name, tagname, classname and even regular expressions.

The Google web page is also not an easy task for browser automation, assuming you would not embed your query in the GET params but treat it like a regular web page where all data is to be input and handled by forms.

The IE class I wrote handles queries to the Google Web Page like this:

Dim linkText as String, query as String: query = "Dog Wikipedia" On Error GoTo CleanIE Set ieClass = New IE ieClass.Navigate "https://www.google.pl/", False ieClass.GetElementByName("q").Value = query ieClass.GetElementByTagName("form").Submit ieClass.WaitForIE 'First wait for the page to mostly load linkText = ieClass.GetRegex("<h3(?:.|/n)*?<a onmousedown=""return(?:.|/n)*?"" href=""(?:.|/n)*?"">((?:.|/n)*?)</a>") CleanIE: ieClass.Quit

That’s 10 lines of code and not hassle with handling the accessibility of any web elements. All the blocking/waiting is handled in the Get* methods which will simply wait until the control is available in the Web Browser or raise an error otherwise if the maxTimeout threshold is breached. You might have noticed the there is still a method called WaitForIE which actually still waits for the browser to confirm that it is not Busy anymore. Why is it there? Because we need to be sure that the browser has at least mostly loaded the new content and that the element we are looking for is not found, by mistake, in the previous page content. This code has proven deterministic for me in over 1’000 tested queries!

One other interesting thing is the GetRegex method which I basically scrapped of my Excel Scrape HTML Add-In. I prefer regular expressions over any other methods for extracting contents from strings/web pages and I encourage you to do so too. It is much easier and once you get the hand of it, it really makes life easier.

The code of the IE class (click on the arrow to expand):

Deterministic browser automation class

'!!!Please reference in Tools->References "Microsoft Internet Controls library"!!! Option Explicit Public Enum READYSTATE READYSTATE_UNINITIALIZED = 0 READYSTATE_LOADING = 1 READYSTATE_LOADED = 2 READYSTATE_INTERACTIVE = 3 READYSTATE_COMPLETE = 4 End Enum Private objIE As Object Const maxTimeout As Long = 10000 'Max time in milliseconds to wait until a control is found before raising error Public ElementNotFoundError As Long Public Function GetIE() Set GetIE = objIE End Function Private Sub Class_Initialize() ElementNotFoundError = 1 End Sub Public Sub Navigate(urlAddress As String, isVisible As Boolean) 'urlAddress: destination url; isVisible: should the IE window be visible Set objIE = New InternetExplorer: objIE.Visible = isVisible: objIE.Navigate urlAddress WaitForIE End Sub Public Sub WaitForIE() While (objIE.Busy Or objIE.READYSTATE <> READYSTATE.READYSTATE_COMPLETE) DoEvents Wend End Sub '----Get elements---- Public Function GetElementByName(name As String, Optional isBlocking As Boolean, Optional index As Long) 'name: name of the html element; isBlocking: is the code to be blocked until the element is found; index: index of the element in the array of elements with this name Dim elems As Object, timeout As Long On Error Resume Next TryAgain: Set elems = objIE.Document.GetElementsByName(name): Set GetElementByName = elems(IIf(IsMissing(index), 0, index)) If IIf(IsMissing(isBlocking), True, isBlocking) And (Err.Number <> 0 Or (GetElementByName Is Nothing)) And timeout < maxTimeout Then Err.Clear: DoEvents: Sleep 5: timeout = timeout + 5 GoTo TryAgain End If If (GetElementByName Is Nothing) Then Err.Raise vbObjectError + ElementNotFoundError, "IE.GetElementByName" End Function Public Function GetElementById(id As String, Optional isBlocking As Boolean) 'id: id of the html element; isBlocking: is the code to be blocked until the element is found Dim timeout As Long On Error Resume Next TryAgain: Set GetElementById = objIE.Document.GetElementById(id) If IIf(IsMissing(isBlocking), True, isBlocking) And (Err.Number <> 0 Or (GetElementById Is Nothing)) And timeout < maxTimeout Then Err.Clear: DoEvents: Sleep 5: timeout = timeout + 5 GoTo TryAgain End If If (GetElementById Is Nothing) Then Err.Raise vbObjectError + ElementNotFoundError, "IE.GetElementById" End Function Public Function GetElementByTagName(tagName As String, Optional isBlocking As Boolean, Optional index As Long) 'tagName: tagname of the html element; isBlocking: is the code to be blocked until the element is found; index: index of the element in the array of elements with this name Dim elems As Object, timeout As Long On Error Resume Next TryAgain: Set elems = objIE.Document.GetElementsByTagName(tagName): Set GetElementByTagName = elems(IIf(IsMissing(index), 0, index)) If IIf(IsMissing(isBlocking), True, isBlocking) And (Err.Number <> 0 Or (GetElementByTagName Is Nothing)) And timeout < maxTimeout Then Err.Clear: DoEvents: Sleep 5: timeout = timeout + 5 GoTo TryAgain End If If (GetElementByTagName Is Nothing) Then Err.Raise vbObjectError + ElementNotFoundError, "IE.GetElementByTagName" End Function Public Function GetElementByClassName(className As String, Optional isBlocking As Boolean, Optional index As Long) 'className: classname of the html element; isBlocking: is the code to be blocked until the element is found; index: index of the element in the array of elements with this name Dim elems As Object, timeout As Long On Error Resume Next TryAgain: Set elems = objIE.Document.GetElementsByClassName(tagName): Set GetElementByClassName = elems(IIf(IsMissing(index), 0, index)) If IIf(IsMissing(isBlocking), True, isBlocking) And (Err.Number <> 0 Or (GetElementByClassName Is Nothing)) And timeout < maxTimeout Then Err.Clear: DoEvents: Sleep 5: timeout = timeout + 5 GoTo TryAgain End If If (GetElementByClassName Is Nothing) Then Err.Raise vbObjectError + ElementNotFoundError, "IE.GetElementByClassName" End Function '----Get HTML by regex---- Public Function GetRegex(reg As String, Optional isBlocking, Optional index As Integer) As String 'reg: regular expression with 1 capture "()"; isBlocking: is the code to be blocked until the element is found; index: index of the element in the array of elements fulfilling this regular expression On Error Resume Next Dim regex, matches, timeout As Long Set regex = CreateObject("VBScript.RegExp") regex.Pattern = reg regex.Global = True If index < 0 Then index = 0 TryAgain: If regex.Test(objIE.Document.body.innerHtml) Then Set matches = regex.Execute(objIE.Document.body.innerHtml) GetRegex = matches(index).SubMatches(0) Exit Function End If If IIf(IsMissing(isBlocking), True, isBlocking) And (Err.Number <> 0 Or GetRegex = vbNullString) And timeout < maxTimeout Then Err.Clear: DoEvents: Sleep 5: timeout = timeout + 5 GoTo TryAgain End If GetRegex = "" End Function Public Function GetMatchCount(reg As String) As Long 'reg: regular expression with 1 capture "()" On Error Resume Next Dim regex, matches Set regex = CreateObject("VBScript.RegExp") regex.Pattern = reg regex.Global = True If regex.Test(objIE.Document.body.innerHtml) Then Set matches = regex.Execute(objIE.Document.body.innerHtml) GetMatchCount = matches.Count Exit Function End If GetMatchCount = 0 End Function '----Quit and terminate---- Public Sub Quit() If Not (objIE Is Nothing) Then objIE.Quit Set objIE = Nothing End Sub Private Sub Class_Terminate() Quit End Sub

I hope this VBA class becomes the cornerstone of every browser automation script you write in VBA!

Feel free to download the whole class file here:

Excel: Deterministic IE automation class286 downloads

Next steps