Windows Applications (Visual Basic) flows

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Posted on by EmberVOIP

Hello,

New to PAD, I am using Desktop version and trying to automate an old Visual Basic windows application.

Can PAD be used for this task? Most of the tutorials I see show how to automate web or windows software based docs like excel.

I need to extract data that is displayed from an old VB app and select UI data, then loop to next record and repeat.

I can use recording successfully, but I would need really automate hundreds of records.

Any help is appreciated and if you can link tutorials that would be perfect. Thx.

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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It can automate most legacy applications, yes. Should be fine. UI automation to automate Excel and similar apps is actually usually a bad idea, so don't follow those tutorials, as their authors clearly don't know what they're doing. UI automation is actually mainly needed to automate legacy apps that do not have proper integration interfaces. It's just that you may not find that many tutorials available, as those apps are usually not generic enough to work as a good example for a video or a blog post.

If you can record stuff and get it to work, it likely is possible and your app can be automated. It's just that the recorder does not generate UI element selectors that are dynamic and you might need to modify them to work for multiple cases. See here for some info on how to modify selectors: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/desktop-flows/build-custom-selectors#use-variables-in-a-custom-selector

I suggest you post a bit more context to what you are trying to do and what you have done so far. We can then help you out with how to get it to work.

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EmberVOIP 2 on at

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Thank you Agnius. But I need a way to select the next record in a VB app which is dynamically creating a table of users. The only way to select a user is to hover over and click each one. Each record is displayed in a table format and cannot be referenced by tab or down arrow or enter key, only hover/click. Also data is not uniformly distributed so I cannot set x,y coordinates and simply decrease y coordinates to the next record. Can this be done in PAD? Thanks again.

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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If you can capture the element that you need to click on via the UI Spy then yes, it can definitely be done. Try using a Click a UI element in window action and then add a UI element to click on via the action properties. Once you have done that, navigate to the controls pane, find the UI element selector you captured, try capturing a few more elements of the same type but on different rows and see how you can pass a variable into the selector to make it work for each record (see my previous reply on how to modify selectors).

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If I have answered your question, please mark it as the preferred solution. If you like my response, please give it a Thumbs Up.

I also provide paid consultancy and development services using Power Automate. If you're interested, DM me and we can discuss it.

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