In addition to the good advice David Flores gave, there are a couple of other things I often do when I encounter a web app where it takes forever for Blue Prism to find elements when not using the Path.
If Match Index along with ID etc doesn't work, I'll often try including Match Reverse. I didn't know about using Ancestor count, so that's a good one to try. After that, I will often go the route of determining the Path of the attributes at run time and then using the Path for the rest of the session that day or at least the rest of the time I have that web page open. Let's say I need to read the values from a list of things and I have to read them all separately (in the case that it can't be read as a table altogether). I'll have a dedicated element in app modeller that does not use the Path and it points to the first item in the list. I'll then use a Read stage to Get the Path of that element, and then I use string manipulation to increment the counter variable inside of it that I can use in a Dynamic Path attribute to find all the rest of the values in the same list. So, for reading the first element in the list, it may be really slow, but after that reading all the rest of the data it's pretty fast because it's now using the Path.
Example:
Let's say that the Path that I get from the first element in the list is this: /HTML/BODY/DIV(1)/TR(1)
That probably doesn't look like a legitimate xpath, but let's pretend like it is. I'll have the read stage get that Path from the element. Remember that I didn't use the Path to identify the element the first time so typically I have 2 different elements: 1 without the Path and 1 with a Dynamic Path.
Then I'll do string manipulation to change the Path to be a sort of template I can use so it becomes like this: /HTML/BODY/DIV(1)/TR({RowNumber}).
Then I just loop or whatever, replacing {RowNumber} with a different number each time such as 1, 2, 3, etc. and might look like this: /HTML/BODY/DIV(1)/TR(3)
That Path is used as an input to the Dynamic Path attribute. So, as I see it, it's not bad practice to use the Path, but it often can be important to retrieve the Path at runtime in case the structure of the page as changed.
------------------------------
Dave Morris
3Ci @ Southern Company
Atlanta, GA
------------------------------
Dave Morris, 3Ci at Southern Company
