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Power Platform Community / Forums / Power Automate / Problem setting browse...
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Problem setting browser instance and extracting data from unique web pages generated daily.

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Posted on by Microsoft Employee

I am working at a company that utilizes a web-based system to report safety incidents. Whenever a new incident occurs, usually daily, I need to pull details from certain fields and store them in an Excel spreadsheet. This seemed easy at first with "Extract data from web page." However, every incident generates its own webpage, which is accessed through a link posted on a main site and only certain types of incidents contain the data I require. So, I can't tell PAD to go to the same URL each time or have it systematically step through each link. I have determined, that manually clicking relevant links is the easiest way to navigate to each incident before data extraction. Once I am on the relevant web page, I don't know how to begin data extraction because the action wants a browser instance and the instance will change with each unique web page. Is there a way that I can tell PAD to start extraction on the active window/web page? I have thought of other ways to do this from the main page but none of the solutions seem straightforward. Any help would be appreciated and I can further clarify if needed.

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  • Verified answer
    Agnius Bartninkas Profile Picture
    Most Valuable Professional on at

    If you really want to go the way you've described, where you manually navigate to the page before you launch the extraction, you need to use the 'Launch New {Browser}' action anyway, but then instead of actually launching a browser, select the option to attach to an already running instance:

    AgniusBartninka_0-1688042500067.png

     

    You can then choose the way you want to identify the tab you're attaching to: 

    • By title (assuming it is the same for all of your cases)
    • By URL (probably would not work for your use case)
    • To the foreground window (basically the active browser tab, which could work in your case)

    Once done, you'll have a browser instance that the further web automation actions will be able to use.

     

    Alternatively, I would suggest trying to automate the initial page that contains links to these incidents - open the browser, navigate to this page (assuming the main URL is static), extract the links to a list and loop through them, opening each link individually and extracting the data.

    This could work, if there is an easy way for the flow to identify which incidents were already processed, if the list can contain them, too. 

  • Community Power Platform Member Profile Picture
    Microsoft Employee on at

    Thank you for the advice! I found the "Attach to running instance" action yesterday actually and it works like I want it to. Right now I'm having problems with "Extract data from web page."

     

    I can get the live web helper up and I can right click elements to bring up the extraction menu but after that I can't click to extract and nothing gets added to the helper but I guess that's a separate issue. Not sure why it's doing that.

     

    "Get details of web page" seems to work better. It basically just pulls all the text from the page and puts it in a table. Until I can get the extraction to work, I will be attempting to make it work with this method.

     

    Your suggestion to run an automated loop is the original way I wanted to do it but it seemed more complicated than it was worth. I have seen that you can compare 2 lists against each other via "Subtract lists." This might be the key to doing it the second way. I will definitely keep working at it. Thank you again!!

  • Agnius Bartninkas Profile Picture
    Most Valuable Professional on at

    I know the web helper was a bit bugged with certain versions and this would in fact happen to some people. I also had the issue with, I believe, version 2.29.xxx or something like that. I would suggest you try to update PAD to the latest version. If that doesn't fix the problem, you might want to raise a support request with Microsoft.

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