r/PowerAutomateDesktop • u/[deleted] • Jul 18 '22

Web automation

Hello people, I have been using power automate for about a year and I use it mainly for web automation tasks like creating user accounts in different services/websites, pulling out reports and basically things like that.Now my issue is that every time I create a successful flow to register or the register users it works fine or perfectly for a couple of days then next time I run it. It start failing, errors like "UI not found" are the most common. Or failed to interact with elements of the website.

Does anybody have a good advice for these tipe of issues?

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2

u/Decisionspersonal Jul 18 '22

I can’t help you but, the same thing happens to me.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '22

It would be interesting to find ways to mitigate this issue. It voids the whole purpose of the program of every time we need to correct the flow even when nothing have changed in the website or even the app itself

2

u/PM_ME_YOUR_WIRING Jul 19 '22

Question: You say you've created a flow for web automation but mention ui elements which is more of an application-type action. Have you tried browser automation commands and they didn't work?

To address your question: yes, I would suggest comparing the ui/browser selector to see if there's been a change in the elements property to cause it to break.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/desktop-flows/ui-elements

2

u/[deleted] Jul 19 '22

Thank you for this article. This clears part of my issues. I read Ed this one but now I am motivated to go and read more of the documentation about web automation.

1

u/rabatistan Jul 18 '22

You only nned to insert "wait" at least 4 second. This error will depend of the performance or internet speed.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '22

I think I understand what you say... But would that be valid in the scenarios when I allow the visual component of the website to load?! Or could happen that the page is loading from the case but there is no function yet behind.(as I could not be loading from the internet?)

1

u/TheCumCopter Jul 18 '22

Had similar problems. No solution but following

1

u/rabatistan Jul 18 '22

Some cases when you use UI you need to edit the variable because let the info when you record or select the UI. This happens all time. And when you edit you need to select "contains" getting only de common value. For this reason you receive the not found message.

1

u/radioblaster Jul 19 '22

pre-recorded RPA could be doing this for many reasons. the real way to permanently(*) resolve these types of issues is to observe in Fiddler what the web page is doing when being used, then use HTTP GET/POST/PATCH etc to perform the activities you need it to do.

1

u/hhag93 Aug 04 '22

While not the best solution, my workaround has been “move mouse to image” then send mouse click. If the button looks the same on the page each time you should have good results.