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Ben M.
2018-06-20T02:27:57Z
Just got started with the program, and am encouraged because it seems to have a lot of potential for future tasks.

I'm stuck right now trying to figure out how to use the browser macro recorder. Ultimately what I'm trying to do is save contact date for vendors in a trade directory website. There are over 70 pages with 10 vendors on each for a total of over 700. I have had a lot of issues navigating the site where paging through the directory sometimes brings up blank pages. I thought I would try to grab the vendor data by automating the following tasks:

1) Navigate to home page
2) Login
3) Navigate to main vendor directory
4) Filter by vendor type and country
5) Open link to vendor detail page in new tab
6) Save vendor detail page source to variable
7) Close vendor detail tab
8) Repeat steps 5-7 for remaining 9 vendors on same page
9) Click Next Page link
10) Repeat steps 5-9 for all 70+ vendor pages

The problem I have is when I try to save the vendor detail page source. It asks me to save to a job or user variable, and I just typed in "VendorList" not knowing what else to try, and it showed a step added where it was saved. When I went to do the same thing for the next vendor on the list, I clicked the down arrow in the job variable combo box, but did not see the VendorList variable there. Does this mean I have to create a new variable name for all 700+ vendors?

I was hoping I could just dump the source code for each vendor in a unique text file generated by the system. I would even be OK with appending it all to one large file, as I will be running a script to parse out the data I need later anyway. I just don't see how I can do this with a simple variable field. I clicked on the "Variables" button at the bottom of this dialog boxes, but could not make heads or tails of how to use any of the large number of variable types listed.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
-Ben


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Support
2018-06-21T11:32:54Z
It depends on how logon works on in the site and if it is the same site and same way to access. In theory the Task will play back exactly what you record and is not built to iterate through all pages unless you had a source of pages that have same type of logon and same way you click and store. So, in your case I think it will be hard to automate this with the current functionality.
Henrik
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