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Empty text field but Populate Text Field on web action successful

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Posted on by aerojean

Hello everyone

I'm having the sporadic issue that text fields are not being populated by text even though the "Populated text field on web page" action completes successfully without any errors. My automation runs many times a day and only a handful of times do I get this behavior and it's always on the same fields in the web page and on the same part of the Attended flow.

It's very difficult for me to debug because it always functions correctly when I'm designing it and testing it and when looking at the flows that failed, they fail at a later stage because the fields were empty but the action of populating them was "successful" (even when they in fact were not filled with text). I can confirm that the text string variables that are supposed to be filled in the fields are present and non-empty.

Has anyone else been having similar issues where an action is marked as successful but does not fill the information?

Thanks

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Power Automate Desktop

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VJR 7,635 on at

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Hard to tell without taking a look. But if populate text is giving issues try Sendkeys of that text.

And also after writing text to the textfield add an If statement to check whether the field is empty. If still empty then add some error handling - maybe something like retry 3 attempts until it becomes non-empty.
JamesP_MSFT Microsoft Employee on at

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@aerojean if the provided answer solved your issue, please mark the thread as resolved.
Thanks.
aerojean 72 on at

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I will try it and monitor it. Will marked as solved if it works and get back if it doesn't! Thanks
aerojean 72 on at

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I tried the SendKeys method and also using the Populate Text Field in Window (UI instead of web automation) and both exhibited the same behavior as before. The only way I got it to work properly was by putting each "Populate Text Field" action inside a For loop that keeps trying until the text value property is not empty. It has been a couple of days using this technique and so far so good so I'll mark your reply as Solution for suggesting the manual error handling.

Thanks!