Browser Automation: Automate Website Actions like Clicks or Data Extraction

Do these steps look familiar?

1. Launch the web application.
2. Enter username in the username field.
3. Enter password in the password field.
4. Click the sign in button.
5. Navigate to the reports section.
6. Enter the current date in the date field.
7. Wait for results of all reports to display.
8. Repeat the following sub-steps for each report:
   • Click on the link of the report.
   • Save the report to the network folder.
9. Log off the website.

Doing this for just one report might only take about 10 minutes, but what happens if you have to do this weekly, daily, or even hourly? Just working with a website or web application could take up hours of your day. With the internet being an essential part of any business, website automation is vital.

Website automation allows you to interact with the websites, portals, and other browser-based applications you use to conduct business. With automation, hand over tedious, manual tasks and get more time back in your day.  Automation can streamline web tasks and perform them with more efficiency—and less errors—than a human. And with a no-code solution, you don’t need any technical experience to start transforming the repetitive tasks that are taking up valuable space on your to-do list.  

• Do you work for a real estate company that needs to download/update current listings? Automate it. 

• Do you work for a hospital that needs to share lab results in a timely manner? Automate it. 

• Is there a pricing report you need to pull from multiple websites and turn that into a daily report that needs to be emailed to various stakeholders? Automate it. 

Web browser automation is the use of software bots to automate common website actions like clicking buttons, filling out forms, extracting data and files from a website, and more. Robotic process automation (RPA) is a great automation technology for streamlining web browser tasks in a faster and error-proof way. RPA bots mimic how you would interact with a website and can do everything from opening, closing, and navigating through browsers, extracting data from web pages, and inputting actions like keystrokes and mouse clicks.

Read more: How to Automate Google Chrome: Web Browser Automation

With Fortra’s enterprise RPA solution, Automate, get the automation features needed to streamline tedious web browser tasks in a scalable, reusable format. Automate not only transforms web-based processes but you can incorporate them into broader workflows throughout your organization to achieve end-to-end automation. Here’s why IT pros choose Automate: 

• The Automate Recorder 
  Easily enable do-it-yourself UI automation in a step-by-step, forgiving approach. Build, update, and create robust screen recordings for real-world automation. Add programming logic, including loops and conditional logic, and incorporate non-UI automation, like calling an API — without writing a single line of code. 

• Native Actions 
  With over 70 out-of-the-box native actions—and 700 sub-actions—to common applications, Automate’s drag-and-drop building blocks allow you to quickly and easily create tasks associated with Microsoft, OCR, AWS, FTP, and more.  

• API Integration Kit 
  Automate’s powerful API integration kit masks the complexity of working with APIs -- like authentication and token management -- through a form-based methodology, so anyone can build robust automation. For power users, bring your own functionality to Automate when create custom native actions for virtually any application, platform, or service with an SDK. 

Let’s look at an example. An IT manager might have been commissioned to make the below task just for the finance department, but with a few tweaks, the same processes can gather data for marketing, sales, or even  human resources. No code means no limits—virtually any business or IT process can be automated. Automate features a user-friendly approach that lets citizen developers build automation fast. 

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Like the scenario above, you can quickly extract data from an HTML table, populate an Excel spreadsheet, and upload the information to a FTP site. All of this can be automated in just a few clicks.

Here are 8 examples of how you can use Automate to transform common website actions:

1. Automate Clicking a Button on a Webpage

One of the most common browser automation tasks is to automate the clicking of a button or link within a web page. The button click is used to navigate a website, confirm data entry operations, select a link to another page, or cancel navigation. You might say the button click is one of the most important operations for a manual or automated browser navigation sequence. 

Traditionally, coding was the only solution to automate these tasks (see below). This is a VB.NET script to automate signing into Gmail. It doesn’t look too complex, but it sure isn't simple, either. Especially if it means completely educating or re-educating ourselves on syntax and coding. 

Unlike the traditional method of identifying a button using the XY coordinates, Automate accesses the HTML elements on a web page. It evaluates or dissects a web page to distinguish each element by a unique identifier. An element can be anything on a web page: a button, a text box, a link, a table, etc. That means a user automating web interactions does not need to worry about the variation of window size or resolution—the Automate task will always find the specified button to click by that unique identifier. 

2. Automate Login to a Website 

There are many sites that need to be navigated via automation but that are also password protected. Examples include a bank portal, vendor or trading partner site, and a customer portal. By automating the login and navigation process for a protected website, many hours of manual processing can be eliminated. Site credentials can also remain protected since they are never manually entered on a website. This is because the Automate solution can store the credentials, perform all site processing, and log all site interactions for compliance. 

3. Automate Web Page Interaction 

Navigating a website to upload files, download files, and enter or extract data is one of the main uses for a web automation tool. Being able to move to a selected control, scroll down a page, or determine which links to click is all part of the process of recording website navigation steps that need to be completed. Once identified, automation steps are entered into a cohesive and consistent automation process that is repeatable every day. 

4. Page Load Monitoring

 When automatically navigating a web application, an automation task is at the mercy of application performance and internet speed. A process needs to be able to wait until the web browser page has loaded completely before continuing forward. This is usually done by a combination of waiting for the page to load and then checking to make sure all the right information is displayed on the page by checking the current page HTML to ensure the desired information is displayed. Once loading is complete, an automation task may continue forward. Page load monitoring is also a good way to check website performance metrics by capturing load times and performance thresholds and reporting issues automatically to the appropriate application and network monitoring teams.

5. Fill in Web Forms Automatically 

This is a great website action to automate for repetitive data entry tasks like filling in web forms. Source data may come from another application screen or by automatically reading data from a database, Excel, or CSV file. It can then be entered automatically into an online form and accept the information via a button click. Auto-filling data can also be used to test response times of an online form. Website automation can be used as part of a web or software deployment QA test workflow or after making updates to a website. 

6. Open/Close a New Tab or Browser Window Automatically

When a web browser automation task runs, the handle of the current window is available for manipulating the window or tab that is currently open. The window can be minimized, maximized, or brought to the foreground as needed. Or maybe the window needs to be in a certain location such as the upper-left corner of the screen and must also be a specific size. It’s always a good idea to store the attributes of a web browser window for use later in a task when making decisions on content that gets displayed. 

7. Data Extraction from a Web Page 

When a data entry or data search task is performed, often there is a need to extract the results from the web page  or download a file to be stored or imported into another automated data entry process, network folder, or document management system. The general idea is to inspect the page and get the desired value from any object on the selected page. Once a value is grabbed it can be stored for later use. Values might be an HTML tag, text or field value, a hyperlink to a file, or any other specific attribute that may need to be used during the process. Values may also be stored to a database file, Excel, CSV, or other document to be used in another process or further down in the currently running automation process. Inspecting the HTML page is also another great use case for extracting data from a page. Once a page has refreshed, the entire HTML document or selected elements are available to be inspected to ensure all expected data is available and a website navigation process workflow is proceeding as planned.

8. Automate Login to Gmail 

  Gmail is one of the most-used email sites, and web browser automation can be used in email automation workflows that require you to login to your Gmail account. Automate can open a web browser, navigate to Gmail’s web browser interface, and log in with your credentials. And for those concerned with password security, you have the option to either disguise the password or password-protect your entire Automate task. Once logged in, bots can monitor your mailbox to capture inbound messages that trigger another automated process based on your specifications—like grabbing attachments and extracting their data into an Excel sheet, for example.