Browser Automation: Automate Website Actions like Clicks or Data Extraction

Automating browser tasks is one area that can simplify administrative processes and give valuable time back to key employees. Many wonder if there are applications they may be missing, and robotic process automation (RPA) is revolutionizing the handling of routine tasks throughout organizations. RPA lets you automate browser tasks by mimicking how you would interact with a website. RPA bots can do everything from opening, closing, and navigating through browsers, extracting data from web pages, and inputting actions like keystrokes and mouse clicks.

Blog Contents:

Apply Automation To Common Website Actions

Website Actions That Can Be Automated

How To Automate Clicking On A Website Or The Typing Of A Username

See Web Browser Automation In Action

Learn About The Automate Solution

Get Started With Web Browser Automation

Apply Automation to Common Website Actions

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 of 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. Automate website actions to handle important yet routine tasks like the ones above and free up your time for other, more important projects.

• 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.

How to automate clicking on a website or the typing of a username

Traditionally, coding is the solution (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.

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Luckily, there's a simpler way to automate web activities: Automate, the RPA solution from Fortra, has the web browser automation features you need to streamline your most tedious web browser tasks. 

The Automate Solution

Automate comes with an RPA screen recording tool and more than 600 pre-built actions, so automation does not need to stop with our preset web Interaction actions. Like the scenario below, 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. For related examples, check out the webinar on data and web scraping. 

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Automate is an automation platform that extends business process automation across all areas of your organization. An IT manager might have been commissioned to make the above 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 an adaptable, forgiving, step-by-step approach that lets citizen developers build RPA fast.

Automate Recorder: Web Browser Interactivity

Before we go into the details of Automate’s web browser capabilities, let’s look at how to automate login to Gmail using the Automate Recorder:

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All we need are these five steps—and less than five minutes—to complete an Automate task to log into Gmail. The steps are displayed in clear language, and everything is done via screen recording, so no programming background is needed. For those who are concerned with password security, you have the option to either disguise the password or password-protect your entire Automate task.

Automate’s web browser action is designed to support common web browsers like Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and Mozilla Firefox, as well as to handle different types of website interaction. Automate offers a step recorder and a comprehensive suite of web browser actions to automate any web activities—from simply clicking a button to extracting data from a table on a web page:

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.

See how you can automate browser actions and other processes.
Start a trial of Automate today.