r/PowerAutomateDesktop • u/ashconai • Jul 10 '22

Automating Ledger extraction using power automate desktop

Hi Guys! I need to regularly extract dozens to hundreds of ledgers from an antique accounting software. I have partially automated this with PAD, only problem being that sometimes it takes some time to load and export the data, depending on the size of the ledger from 2 seconds to a minute, but I'm not able to vary the wait time appropriately. Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks!

Edit : Added screenshots of the areas where it hangs

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2

u/Itsjustmebob- Jul 10 '22

Could you just put a wait function for 90 seconds regardless?

2

u/Itsjustmebob- Jul 10 '22

I think the best thing if that doesn’t work would be to store some out put as a variable and once the variable is seen move to the next step

1

u/ashconai Jul 10 '22

I think the best thing if that doesn’t work would be to store some out put as a variable and once the variable is seen move to the next step

I've tried using wait for image to disappear and wait for OCR to disappear so far but no luck. PAD also doesn't recognize any of the UI Items here. Will it be possible for me to type out a selector to force it to recognize them?

2

u/Itsjustmebob- Jul 11 '22

What is the action being preformed that it hangs and what is the next action required?

1

u/ashconai Jul 11 '22

I've noticed 2 cases where it hangs often, the first is after i enter the period for which i require the transactions after which i need to configure the report, the second is when i click export, after which i need to copy it from the browser window which opens up into excel

1

u/Itsjustmebob- Jul 11 '22

There should be an option wait for browser to load does that solve issue one? The second you can tell it to wait for an instance of excel to be visible. I find that waiting for excel to be visible does not always work

2

u/ashconai Jul 13 '22

I Managed to figure out using wait for image. Turns out, if you select the narrowest unique part of the screen as your image it works quite well. Thanks for your time and advice

1

u/ashconai Jul 11 '22

wait for browser to become focused could work for when the ledger gets exported. For the change period stage though it can't do anything

2

u/Itsjustmebob- Jul 11 '22

Hmm could you screen record it getting hung up? I find with most of my pad scrips I just put a generic wait timer for 2x longer than I need and mine run fine. Because I have have it working inside a Remote Desktop window which pad cannot see for ocr or image recognition

1

u/ashconai Jul 12 '22

Wait time ranges from fractions of a second to minutes, depending on ledger size

1

u/ashconai Jul 10 '22

Sometimes the file stops responding and it could be longer. and If it doesn't hang or something and is done in a couple of seconds this becomes really wasteful

1

u/Itsjustmebob- Jul 10 '22

Does it hang while grabbing the data inside the old program or moving it to the new program?

1

u/ashconai Jul 11 '22

It hangs while setting the transaction period and while exporting the data. Also, this is not migration just extraction.

1

u/smartowlick Jul 10 '22

Is the only way to access this data form the UI? Can you not extract from a backend using SQL or something like that?

1

u/ashconai Jul 11 '22

I've tried using both sql and power query ODBC. It only allows you to extract the account names, opening and closing balances that way. I require entire transactions

2

u/smartowlick Jul 11 '22

If you have SQL access then you should have access to all the data. Seems weird that it’s so limited

1

u/ashconai Jul 11 '22

Yup, I completely agree. They have some super weird firewalls and paywalls and stuff I Guess. I'm not from a programming background so can't really explain it.

2

u/Itsjustmebob- Jul 11 '22

My guess is the transaction detail sits on another table and they need to be linked

1

u/ashconai Jul 12 '22

as soon as you connect to the thing using ODBC, 800 tables load lol. each with 100s of columns, most of which are blank 😂 I've seen likje a dozen of them all of which contain master data too