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Slecting menue items and populating fields is very slow

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

Hi experts,

I'm having performance issues with rather easy commands such as "Populate text field in window". The first attempt in a new windows results in a waiting time of up to 30 seconds. The following fields are filled fast. The same is when selecting a menu item. It takes up to 10 seconds to get a menu command executed. Putting a "wait 1s"-command before the populate command is not helping either (found this in another post). Sending text through keyboard commands is working fast (e.g. Using Alt-F O instead Menu/File/Open)

I encounter these issues in an MS application (notepad; "Inserting text from the clipboad" and "file save as") as well as in own apps.

I searched various forums I didn't find anything of real help. Taskmanager is not showing any performance peak. It just looks as if the computer is having a little rest (it's a rather fast model with 11gen I7 processors and 32GB and 8 cores using Windows 10 Pro Version 10.0.19042 Build 19042. Network is fast, too (300MB down- and 100MB upstream).

Any hints to overcome these obstakles and to make the automation fast?

Cheers,

Stefan

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Power Automate Desktop

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ryule 929 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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Does your previous step have the "wait for page to load" option selected? You may try removing that and using your own wait time. I have some web apps where it takes a while for the whole page to officially load, even though you can really go ahead and start populating and working.

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Henrik_M 2,021 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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Try inserting Wait for window content before your actions, but.... sometimes things are just slow, seemingly without reason. I'm following the topic to see if anyone has any insights.

@ryule He is automating a Windows application, so there is no wait for page to load setting 😕

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @Henrik_M ,

thanks for your hint. I just added "wait for window content" without recognising a change. The window content is recognised fast and thereafter the Keyboard send command keeps waiting for whatever...

I'm using the below command and tried it already with SendTextAsHardwareKeys = false. Changing DelayBetweenKeystrokes doesn't change the waiting time either.

MouseAndKeyboard.SendKeys.FocusAndSendKeys TextToSend: SourceFilename DelayBetweenKeystrokes: 5 SendTextAsHardwareKeys: True

Btw: I'm using this step to overcome another PAD issue: Excel.SaveAs results in US dates and numbers which is preventing us from using this function as we need European formatting. So I decided to copy the excel tab to clipboard and paste it to notepad and save as text. That works excellent ;-). In a second app I really need to feed two fields and have the same issue. Somewhere somebody suggested to apply a change in edge which might solve it. But I can't find that post again.

Well, looks like I have to stay patient (a manual action is much faster, though) or to search for another solution.

Cheers
Stefan

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Meanwhile I tested each and every possible command (UI commands or Keyboard commands) to fill the filename during "Saveas" in notepad...always the same: Waiting for the unknown.

The funny thing is that sending CTRL-V followed by CTRL-S works pretty well in notepad.

Does anybody else have an idea?

Cheers,
Stefan

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Pavel_NaNoi 1,074 on at

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Does the same issue occur when you're running from console rather than from debug?
the debug mode can be a bit crap sometimes.

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @Pavel_NaNoi , yes it does.

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Pavel_NaNoi 1,074 on at

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Mind sharing some screenshots of your code and what you're trying to do? I can't seem to re-create this issue on my end.

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @Pavel_NaNoi

Sure. It's a pretty basic flow as we wanted to try PAD for the first time.

Automation of SAP Order Import
This PAD flow aims to automate our internal SAP Order Creation based on Excel files (Approx. 300.000 orders a year).
Flow:
Copy all files into special path (done by the user on its machine)
Start the flow
User to select the directory containing order excel files
Loop through all files in this directory
Open Excel file
Save content of first tab to tab-delimited txt file
     Filename of txt file is the same as excel base file (just with different extension and in different folder)
     Since Excel.SaveAs from PAD converts date and numbers into an US format we are using a workaround to get the tab-delimited file created
Copy the entire content of the main tab to clipboard
Open Notepad
Paste the clipboard to notepad
Save Notepad content by giving a proper txt filename (this is where it gets slow the first time)
Start own application to read the tab-delimited files and convert the content into an upload format
We need to fill two fields and press a button (second time when it get’s slow)
     Source filename from previous step
     Destination filename with converted upload data
Once all of this is working, we’ll add the last step to let the orders create in SAP.
You’ll find code-snipes below (hope your German is good enough 😉; The funny thing is that my computer is installed with English Windows and MS365 versions while some MS apps (like PAD) are running in German, and I cannot change it. Especially the MS cloud apps are all in German language)

Prep-Steps: Setting a few variables and asking for the directory containing the excel files

Now we loop through all files

App with fields to be filled (had to grey out some sensitive values):

Cheers,
Stefan

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Please let me share an interesting observation:
Wenn I run the same commands outside the loop everything is working fine, as soon as they are executed within the loop, the waiting time appears.

Any thoughts?

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Pavel_NaNoi 1,074 on at

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Actually not that uncommon for the for each to break something, I'll take a look at it in an ~hour and get back to you.
Also, is the Sourcefilename just a simple set variable with a file path or is it updated in the code somewhere due to some condition? (My German is indeed, not that good 😄)

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