Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium
1–10 of 51 posts
Re: Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium
#2Webdriver is for more than just testing! Very cool demonstration.
My biggest headache was in getting the right selectors for the various form fields - some services have shifting IDs and classes (ugh xpath)
Re: Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium
#3Ha! I see your crappy UI in PeopleSoft, with hard to automate edge cases, and I raise you multiple SharePoint instances!
Ante up at your peril in this game :/)
Re: Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium
#4Love it. I've built a flight search tool in selenium too, and for isolating deals. (I've also used selenium for testing). The biggest problem is the speed and the unexpected (the spinner you experienced, intermittent page load times, asynchronous requests or when elements are stale as a result). But it is possible to do it.
Next you can thread the sucker, so you could have 2-4 PS windows open and enter at a faster speed ;)
Re: Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium
#5I'm always interested in clever use cases for Selenium.
It seems like "automating boring stuff using Selenium" should be a bigger category than it is - and use cases that can do it profitably are always fascinating.
Re: Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium
#6There is an entire class of business problems that can be solved using Selenium.
I don’t love that raw http connections are the universal API, but at least it’s a tool in our belts when these companies provide lackluster or zero proper interfaces.
Re: Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium
#7I use selenium similarly to drive a similarly awful interface known as costpoint. I would DEARLY love to know how to use the browser developer tools to figure out what is actually happening under the hood of websites without having to read every single Javascript module. The network tab shows you what is sent and received but it's not easy to figure out how those messages are created and parsed. It would be nice to learn how to debug and step through some of that.
If I could learn the underlying api, I could write a tool that would never change. The ui changes much more frequently than the interface between client and server code. Besides, it would be much faster this way.
Re: Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium
#8I'm always interested in clever use cases for Selenium. It seems like "automating boring stuff using Selenium" should be a bigger category than it is - and use cases that can do it profitably are always fascinating.
RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is a big category of tools that can be summarised as ‘automating boring stuff’. You often see it used for repetitive data entry, e.g.
1. Load excel sheet from X:\...
2. Login to Y
3. For each row navigate to ... then enter data
4. Submit, if there’s a validation error add it to and excel workbook
5. Email exception report to ...
Re: Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium
#9I use selenium similarly to drive a similarly awful interface known as costpoint. I would DEARLY love to know how to use the browser developer tools to figure out what is actually happening under the hood of websites without having to read every single Javascript module. The network tab shows you what is sent and received but it's not easy to figure out how those messages are created and parsed. It would be nice to l…
If you click on the "initiator" column in the network tab it will jump to the code that created the request. Can also see stack traces, set breakpoints, etc.
Re: Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium
#10#FunFact: I started the Selenium project. My first job out of college was at PeopleSoft. I left PeopleSoft and went "in-house" as the PeopleSoft admin at ThoughtWorks. A few years later, Selenium came out as a side-project for another internal system we needed. But when we were rolling out Selenium and dreaming up "world domination plans", one of my mine was to get a copy of Selenium to ship with every copy of PeopleSoft (supplanting the free copy of SQA Robot that PeopleSoft shipped by default). Anyway, I never really pursued that particular "plan", but here we are.