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URL no longer working in PAD

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Posted on by kilroyscarnival

I've been using Power Automate Desktop to do a daily download of ten data files from an SQL server at the same URL for over a year. Suddenly last week, and possibly after I took the latest software update, possibly after a Windows update that affected Edge, the first step to attain the web page has been failing.

It suddenly seems to be parsing the address and the multiple "%" in it into separate pages, as guessed by what the top of my browser looks like.

I figured out a workaround - found a landing page within their site to open and then recorded clicking the link to the page I needed. But I'm wondering whether there's a reason why it worked for so long then suddenly doesn't.

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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I have heard of similar issues from other users. It seems to be caused by the latest PAD update.

What does seem to work, however, is passing the URL into a Run application action as a parameter when you run edge.exe. You can then use Launch new Microsoft Edge to attach to the instance that was created by Run application.

While this is a workaround, I have been using this for years (on Chrome mainly, but the same applies to Edge, too). This is because Launch new Chrome frequently fails inconsistently due to the browser extension not loading in time. This results in lots of browser windows being opened, but the flow eventually failing after too many retries. But when I use Run application and then attach to the browser, it never fails. So, this is really a workaround for a different issue that I've been experiencing on various machines in various client environments. But it also works for this particular issue caused by the recent update.

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kilroyscarnival 27 on at

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Thank you, Agnius! I tried my setup with both Chrome and Edge, and found it was more foolproof using Edge. It's still a little tricky as I have to select things from multiple dropdowns, and if it's running too fast, it doesn't seem to grab the right file type to download to on the last dropdown.

For me, having it go to a page within the DOT site that had a link to the tables I want seems to work. I will definitely keep your solution in mind, especially if my workaround proves buggy as well.

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ArtQ 3 on at

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I tried this approach, but ran into a problem that I cannot refer to Browser instance anymore, which I need for further processing. Is there a way to work around it?

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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You still need to use the Launch new Microsoft Edge (or Chrome) action, but make it attach to a running instance, instead of launching a new one. This will generate the browser instance variable to be used in further actions.

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