[Noob] Why selenium can click what pad can't ?

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Posted on by businesstaken

I played with selenium and was able to click links pad isn't capable of, how come ?

I've been trying to trigger selenium from pad but for some reason selenium doesn't get triggered by pad

thanks

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Power Automate Desktop

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Pstork1 69,661 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Selenium is an alternate Web recorder that is available when you first start a new desktop flow from the regular Power Automate environment. When you create a new desktop flow from there you will see a link at the bottom of the dialog for Additional desktop flow options . Clicking that link will pull up a dialog that lets you create a desktop flow using Selenium. That option isn't available in the newer Power Automate Desktop since it has its own web recorder.

Take a look at this article.

Learn to create Selenium IDE flows for Websites - Power Automate | Microsoft Docs
businesstaken 26 on at

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thanks for your answer, it helped to run selenium again but didn't answer my question.
My question is: why I can click certain elements with selenium while with pad I can just "hover" over those elements without getting an actual click ? I tried again with the same website and If I create a flow with selenium it is capable to click rows inside a table, actually selecting those results. While with pad those same rows just get yellow. Plus something I find really useful about selenium is that he will try to translate selector to xpath and viceversa, this slow down a lot the flow but once you get it right it just works. I'm not complaining, I'm genuinely curious.

thanks again
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Pstork1 69,661 Most Valuable Professional on at

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I think the answer is that Selenium wasn't designed by Microsoft, but the web recorder in Power Automate Desktop was. Different designers and developers decided on a different approach. I don't think there is an answer to why. If Selenium works for the way you want to do it then I would use Selenium.