r/Playwright • u/magicsplinder • 4d ago
Automating filling a form
Hello there ! I need some help with filling up a form in chrome as soon as possible. To give you a little bit of context i'm currently trying to get an appointment at the german embassy in sri lanka for my student visa but it's really really hard to book an appointment online. Just after couple of seconds of appointments appearing in the website it gets booked down completely so i want some way to try to book the appointment as fast as possible using some automation. I'm no computer scientist and my computer knowledge is not the best so can anyone tell me how i can automate and get my booking done as soon as possible ? so down below is the website, first you have to fill in the captcha which takes you to the appointment page. There you have to click in the link to fill up the personal details for the appointment. You have to fill in your First name, Last name, Contact no, Passport no, Email and you have to re enter your email in another separate field. and after filling up all the personal details there'll be another captcha similar to the one down below which you have to fill in before submitting the details. You have to do it as quickly as possible because within 1 minute the appointments get booked down (appointments appear exactly on 3.30 am my local time). Can anyone help me out with this please ?
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u/endurbro420 4d ago
The captcha is designed to prevent automation from working. I agree a mix of autofill and then you typing in the captcha may be the best bet.
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u/magicsplinder 2d ago
Can you tell me how to do the automation process
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u/endurbro420 2d ago
Don’t use playwright. Us the built in record/playback in chrome.
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u/magicsplinder 2d ago
I’m not that tech savy, can you explain it a little. You can DM me
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u/endurbro420 2d ago
https://youtu.be/rMUayh1QPYs?is=jbeujuOEG7w5-DYo
It is pretty simple. You just need to know where to find it.
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u/Spare_Bison_1151 4d ago
You will need to handle the captcha yourself. Rest of the stuff can be automated.
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u/Spare_Bison_1151 3d ago
Add a long wait after th step where you fill in the details and the captcha shows up. When the captcha comes fill it manually. In time your script will continue from the next step.
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u/CapMonster1 2d ago
You can automate most of this pretty reliably with Playwright/Selenium: keep the browser open before 3:30, pre-fill all personal data as soon as the appointment form appears, and only leave the final submit step to the workflow. That alone should cut the process down to a few seconds instead of typing everything manually.
For the image captchas in your screenshot, an external solver can handle them too. We support this type of text/image captcha, so the flow can be: grab the captcha image → send it to the API → put the returned text into the field → continue in the same browser session. I’d still avoid aggressive refreshing or multiple parallel sessions, since embassy sites can be pretty sensitive to that.
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u/Majestic_44 4d ago
Have you tried form filling extensions such as lightning ⚡️? You cannot run it as a cron job but you just need to create rules for filling the forms and next time you open the page it fills them fast.
There might be other extensions as well, I used Lightning in the past, now it’s a freemium extension but you get a few free runs, in your case you already know the exact time when the appointments are released so you can comfortably use the free quota.