Dynamic Selector (variable in selector) in Desktop Automation

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Posted on by HellitonWoo

Hi fellow users,

Has anyone found a solution to use "variable" in the selector?

For instance, the application may have a table, to click and type into the table, I need the index of the row and column.

Thus it would be nice to create a variable to help to point to the row that I'm about the click.

I've tried referring the variable using %var%, but it won't work.

Helliton

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Power Automate Desktop

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adijain Microsoft Employee on at

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Hello @HellitonWoo,

Variables can be parsed in CSS and UI selectors in Power Automate Desktop. To do that please follow the steps below:
Search for the element that needs to be edited in the UI elements pane, right click on the element and go to edit selectors.
Navigate to the selector builder which can be used to easily customize the selector and click on "custom" toggle button.
Now for your case you would need to parse the variable %var_row% in the table selector attribute. e.g. shown in the screenshot below:

Hope the above helps. Please let us know the target selector path and variable name to be parsed if you encounter any issues. Thanks!

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HellitonWoo 39 on at

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@adijain
Thanks for the answer!

This is the selector, and the way it worked exactly as explained:
window[Class="#32770"][Name="New Invoice"] > list[Class="SysListView32"] > listitem[Id="ListViewItem-%row_nr%"] > text[Id="ListViewSubItem-%col_nr%"]

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi

I struggled a bit with using a dynamic selector as well untill I understood that in order for it to work, "Custom" HAS to be toggled 🙂

Best Regards
Mikkel

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Kevin77 2 on at

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Hi Guyz,

Please help to solve this dynamic selector div[Id="screenarea2.B10"].

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adijain Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @Kevin77, you can customize the selector to this:
iframe[Id="application-Shell-startGUI"] > div[Id^="screenarea2"]

this can be done either by hitting the custom button or changing the div's Id attribute operator to "Starts with"

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RiiG 21 on at

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Hi

can variables be used in attribute names?
this didn't work.....

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RiiG 21 on at

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is there any way to remove the quotes from around the variable in the selector above?

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Niraj466 73 on at

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I'm also facing the same issue. Variable used as Value for Attribute, it looks it doesn't work.

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RiiG 21 on at

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sorry i cant help with your specific question!
but I managed to do what I wanted (message 7) without using the Visual editor
good luck

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Niraj466 73 on at

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Anyone can have idea, why the attribute name "Ordinal" is not displaying in "Preview selector". Is this a bug here or I'm missing anything?

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