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Is there a way to switch tabs in the same browser instance

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

I have one site open in my first tab. I select values from text fields and save those into variables. Then I need to switch to tab #2 so that I can input those values/variables into fields at the second site (tab). What generic "Go To Web Page" seems to do, with To Url, is to put the url for the second site/tab into the address bar for the first tab that I'm already targeting - which is not what I want because I'll need to return to tab #1 later on.

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MichaelAnnis 5,727 Moderator on at

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Use Send Keys:

This is for chrome:

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/157179?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop#zippy=%2Ctab-window-shortcuts

Good luck!

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Hmm, next problem.

I use Populate text field on web page to write the values into fields in the second, target, page. However, I determined that they're getting written into the source page where the html input fields have the same names (both locations built by, more or less, the same people). Check: do I have my target UI elements properly selected on the target page? Yes, it appears that I do. Fiddled with it some using Add UI element - but still getting the same results, meaning, it's writing back to the source page and not the target page.

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MichaelAnnis 5,727 Moderator on at

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Edit the header of the UI elements to see if you can differentiate between the two. You probably have something that looks like this:

Pane - Chrome

UI 1

UI 2

UI 3

Pane - Chrome 2

UI 1

UI 2

UI 3

Edit the bold header to differentiate from the two...sometimes it might be title name or something. I currently have a flow and I use regular and icognito, because i'm accessing the same website twice. It's probably not necessary as there are other selectors, but for me, by selecting the "Name" checkbox...incognito was in the second one, so it doesn't confuse the two.

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BoredFish 26 on at

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Yes I know, this is technically not a direct answer to the specific question, and I realize that... however, I think it's fairly reasonable in this use-case to point out that unless you need to physically see the tab as the Flow runs, there's really no need to navigate across browser tabs.

When you use the Action Create new tab, it stores that tab into a new web browser instance variable. If you're using defined UI elements from each page for basic stuff like clicking buttons, scraping data or inputting text, then PAD can interact with the elements on those tabs even if they're not visible by using the correct instance variable.

I tested these two Actions in Chrome which returned successful results from the 2nd tab while 3 tabs were opened and the 3rd tab in foreground the entire time.
~
Just to make sure, I also tested If text on screen (OCR); and even though I expected it to fail since the necessary text was on a background tab, it actually succeeded the first few times. This really had me going for a minute! Until I realized it was identifying the target text from it's own block in the PAD Designer window itself on my second monitor... yea I'm a dummy 🤣

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