Data extraction element not found

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Posted on by CU20010304-0

I’ve been struggling with this for (embarrassingly) 4 hours. Please bear with me, as I’m relatively new to PAD (although I’ve been a developer for 30 years).

I'm using Power Automate Desktop to screen scrape an MLS website (I'm a legitimate user with credentials). I have a list of addresses I read into a data table.

In a FOR EACH loop I populate a search textbox with an address and submit the search, which loads a new page with the results. I can successfully grab the page elements and write them to an Excel sheet. Cool.

At the bottom of the loop I issue the GO TO WEB PAGE Action to reload the search page, so it’s sitting exactly the same as at the top of the loop. Cool.

The first pass executes as expected. The second pass, however, gives me errors on DATA EXTRACTION ELEMENT NOT FOUND for each of the numeric values. For example:

Bedrooms 4
Bathrooms 3

The Actions find the “Bedrooms” and “Bathroom” elements, but not the “4” and “3”.

I’m at a loss. Can anyone help a guy out? Thanks in advance...

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eetuRobo 4,522 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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I assume you are using "Extract data from web page" -action. Did you use "Extract entire HTML table" like below?

The error sounds like the table element has changed and it cant find it the same as in your first loop iteration.

Try inspecting the web site with browsers inspect tool and find the tables id. See if it changes when your flow first does the loop iteration (when it works fine) and on the second iteration when your flow goes to the site again. So pause the flow on each iteration and check if the id changes. If it doesn't change then you can use "Advanced settings" and give it CSS selector to be table[id="insert the correct id here"]

Or if the id changes then if the class stays the same use class instead. Or what ever attribute you can find.

If you are still having trouble try to figure out why the sites table element changes. Maybe try build the loop so that you don't need to refresh the site but just clear the search and at the end of your loop. So if the issue is that the table element gets lost when you reload the site with the "Go to web page" -action then try to do the flow without having the page load again. If the site is publicly available then if you can share the site so that we can troubleshoot the issue better.

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PieterVeenstra 33 on at

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Could it be that you are opening more browser instances every time you test this. Have a look into how you are selecting the browser window. most likely you will find an eq(..) with .. being a number so that it doesn't match the browser you just got PAD to open.

In general I try to find an instance of the browser (by title) and then close that session before getting my PAD flow to open a new session. That way I guarantee that I only have an app open once.

https://sharepains.com/2025/12/22/open-an-app-in-power-automate-desktop/

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