Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hello, I have been using Power Automate Desktop for a couple of months now to automate repetitive tasks in a browser-based part of my job that is basically filling out the same forms over and over using slightly varied information. I have several fully functional flows but my issue is that they are slowed by one action that is called multiple times per run-- It takes 10-20 seconds for the "Launch New Chrome > attach to Chrome tab with URL" action to run.

The forms open several new browser windows (the dependent/protected kind where you cant alter the URL, if that matters) and Chrome is the only browser the company approves the website to be accessed from. I am using a partial URL (example: website.com/personprofile/form1, when the actual URL has tons of unique ID alphanumeric strings after 'form1')

Each time it clicks a link that opens a new window, it pauses for 10-20 seconds while it 'figures out' where the tab that it's supposed to be looking at is. I have tried attaching by title but found that they are often the same as each other (and I can't close the original one because they all close, they are dependent). Using the foreground window also just fails. I tried searching on here but found nobody with the same question so if it is just my computer then that's that I guess. My chrome, PAD chrome extension and version are up to date.

Is there anything I can do to make it attach to the correct window significantly faster?

Thank you!

P.S. Similarly, the 'get details from element on webpage' is also slow. Is there some browser setting or windows process or PAD action that I can change/disable/enable to make it faster? Thank you!!

Categories:

Power Automate Desktop

You probably will not be able to make attaching to the tab any faster, when you cannot use the full URL. That's just how it is. But if the button you click on to actually open the new tab has the URL behind it, you might be able to extract that via Get details of element on web page to have the full URL and then use that to attach to the new tab when it's open. That might be slightly faster.

As for the Get details from element on web page action being slow - there are no settings in Chrome to make it faster. But if you define a better element selector, it might find the element slightly faster. Make sure that you don't just target the very last item in the selector string with an Id or something like that, but actually include some parent elements. While this is technically less robust (more reliant on the structure of the page not changing), but it will improve performance when finding the element, as the flow will need to screen less of the entire page structure while looking for it.