Select Appropriate Link on basis of date

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Posted on by PJ-24040503-0

I need to download a file from Business Objects , everyday.

however, the link to the download is with the timestamp of the day (picture below).

On PAD-I recorded the actions and it produced a step with static date. How can I make this dynamic.

Example : for tomorrow - will have the link as Apr 24, 2025

Note : Hours and Minutes timestamp can be ignored. I am focused on making this dynamic basis the month, day and year only.

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Power Automate Desktop

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eetuRobo 4,535 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Get current date and convert it to that format so "MMM dd, yyyy"

Then modify your UI element (so open the element named: Anchor 'Apr 23, 2025 10:20 AM'). Change the Text to have operator Contains and then use the FormattedDateTime -variable.

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PJ-24040503-0 8 on at

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dear @eetuRobo - your answer worked brilliantly. However, now Im facing a new challenge.

On the same BO page - I may have more than 1 link with the same date out of which I need to select the "latest" link with Status as "Success"

image for your reference

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eetuRobo 4,535 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Good to hear it worked!

You can try to modify the UI element selector to find a row that contains "Success" in it and take the first Ordinal so the first it finds of that kind.

So in this example I have Selector of UI element that finds a data table row that contains "San Francisco" in it (for you it would be "Success") and text "Brenden Wagner" (for you it would be %FormattedDateTime%) and lastly Ordinal is 0 which is it eq(0)

So if your element would be structurally the same then:
table[Id="example"] > tbody > tr:contains("Success") > td[Text*="%FormattedDateTime%"]:eq(0)

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PJ-24040503-0 8 on at

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hi @eeturobo, I got the UI element selector like below.

Unfortunately, I could not work it out. Can you please help.

frame[Id="headerPlusFrame"] iframe[Id="dataFrame"] frame[Id="workspaceFrame"] frame[Id="workspaceBodyFrame"] a[Id="URE_listNodeLink0_0"]

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eetuRobo 4,535 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Its hard to figure out without being able to try to capture the UI element myself and edit it. Where do you use the FormattedDateTime that you said worked previously? I cant see it in that Selector for UI element. If you use Inspect in your browser is the table inside a <table> tag?

Also be sure to use browser automation to capture the elements and not UI Automation since that will often take different type of selector which will not work with browser actions.

Another method you could use is to use Extract data from web page -action.

That should produce datatable. Then you can build logic where you can find the row which has both todays date and "Success" in status column. So use "Find or replace in data table" -action to first find the rows that has the correct date. Then do the same thing but find every success status rows. Then retrieve those datatable matches first column which is row column to lists. So you should have two lists. One list has row numbers for every row for the date and second list all the row numbers which contain the "Success" status. Then use "Find common list items" -action to those two lists so it should return only the row number which has todays date and status success.

Full example flow for reference:

Then use that in the Selector for Ordinal (Text editor needs to be on when using Ordinal because of long lasting bug in PAD). So in my example case I added :eq(%RowNumber%) after the table row element (tr)

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PJ-24040503-0 8 on at

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dear @eeturobo - i am almost there, but not finished yet.

I replicated your steps and landed at this point. However, Im facing an error. My assumption is that Im getting the table ID incorrectly. Please help.

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eetuRobo 4,535 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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My assumption is that Im getting the table ID incorrectly.

Check that with the web browsers "Inspect" feature. Press F12 or right click on the webpage and choose "Inspect" in the bottom.

So in my example you can see that the tables id s "example" and for you it should be "URE".

Did you capture the cell element and did it give you this type of element selector: table[ld="URE"] > tbody > tr > td

If you just wrote that based on my example it might not work since the table element structure could be very different.

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