Over the years, Web pages have become more functional. More and more, Web pages appear like apps rather than the "old billboards on the information superhighway." These new styles of Web pages rely on JavaScript running in the browser to create the interactions. It's a better experience for the human, but it can make things more complex for your Digital Workers.
When trying to automate a modern web-based application, you need to deal with JavaScript. JavaScript is a programming language that resides in the browser. The Web server that presents the HTML page to the browser often sends JavaScript alongside the HTML. The JavaScript can manipulate the HTML page locally within the browser; it's what gives you the cool Web app UI. But it means that the page the server sent is not the page that the user sees in the browser.
So, if you are using a Digital Worker to capture the HTML source of a page, it might not give you the results you expected.
Enter Selenium, the open-source web browser extension that can help you solve this problem. Selenium is an industry-standard tool for automating web browsers. Initially designed to automate the testing of web applications, it can do a lot more than that. It provides an API that allows you to do several things. You can send messages to press buttons, move the cursor, extract text, and take screenshots precisely like the user. Selenium runs the browser's JavaScript engine to render the HTML into the form the user sees. Yes, it was designed for testing, but you can also use it to help with Intelligent Automation.
And our clever friends at Reveal Group have made it easier for you to use Selenium if you need it. The Function for Get HTML from Chrome - 1.0.0 is a downloadable Asset from the DX that makes it easier to use Selenium for your automations.
The VBO looks at the version of Chrome that you're running and determines if there is an updated Selenium driver for it. If so, it updates the driver, which is a Chrome extension. Once the VBO knows that the driver is up-to-date, the VBO downloads the Web Page using Selenium and returns the HTML after the Chrome JavaScript engine has processed it. Thus, the Digital Worker's HTML is the same HTML a human would see.
Star Blue Prism Automator, Nicolas Payeur, used the Reveal Group Asset and said:
"This asset is awesome. Not only did it save us a ton of time when converting IE-based HTML actions to Chrome-based actions, but it also drastically improved the speed of the automations, allowing us to process 5x as much volume as before (when the User Interface was used)"
So, if you need to automate a dynamic Web app, make your life easy and consider using Selenium with the Reveal Group tool on the Digital Exchange.
