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Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium

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Re: Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium

#31

Post by bickeringyokel »

sbierwagen wrote: post #28
julianeon wrote: post #5

I'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.

The fact that you have to update Chromedriver with every Chrome release now doesn't make things easier.

Is that new? I seem to remember never updating the driver even after chrome did it's auto updates and still having my code run.

I use a managed service now so I don't have to sorry about that stuff

Re: Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium

#32

Post by bickeringyokel »

edoceo wrote: post #2

Webdriver 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)

When you start using xpath that's 20 parents deep and every line of code scrolls off the page you quickly realize how important it is for your devs to to write good accessible and unique element IDs.

Re: Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium

#33

Post by kfk »

Any tools to do this with native applications too not just browsers? We have been flooded by this RPA companies the past 2 years and I'd love a way to do this with Python. It is actually a potentially very profitable market since the impact of automation is very visible (people see cursors do stuff for them...).

Re: Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium

#34

Post by cranekam »

Another +1 for Selenium. I used it to bag tickets for a show I wanted to see. The seller’s site was terrible and apparently had no protection against ticket spinners so all 5,000 tickets sold out in minutes. Fortunately their resale site also had no protection at all so it was easy to write something to reload the page often and put tickets into my shopping cart as soon as they became available. When that happened it notified me and handed back control for me to enter the credit card details (I was too lazy to automate it all). I’m not proud of this brute force approach but if the reseller’s site wasn’t so awful to start with it wouldn’t be necessary.

Re: Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium

#35

Post by patrickk »

unreal6 wrote: post #23

"Peoplesoft is a curse on humanity" I would love to know the story of how this wretched piece of software seems to have embedded itself into nearly every college and university in the United States.

The 4 ways to spend money[1], in this case, spending someone else's money on someone else. Likely a procurement person with no IT knowledge, who never has to deal with the painful solution, but got wined and dined by the salesman.

[1] https://investorjunkie.com/economics/milton-friedman-ways-sp...

Re: Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium

#36

Post by halo »

sleet wrote: post #8
julianeon wrote: post #5

I'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 ...

What software is generally used for this? Is there anything available for the average person that doesn’t require spending a small fortune?

Re: Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium

#37

Post by sbierwagen »

bickeringyokel wrote: post #31
sbierwagen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you have to update Chromedriver with every Chrome release now doesn't make things easier.

Is that new? I seem to remember never updating the driver even after chrome did it's auto updates and still having my code run. I use a managed service now so I don't have to sorry about that stuff

Chromedriver used to support three major releases of Chrome at a time, now it supports one: https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads This means all selenium scripts break every two months.

Re: Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium

#38

Post by gadders »

unreal6 wrote: post #23

"Peoplesoft is a curse on humanity" I would love to know the story of how this wretched piece of software seems to have embedded itself into nearly every college and university in the United States.

All these enterprise systems are crap. Trying using SAP. It's not better.

Re: Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium

#39

Post by gadders »

julianeon wrote: post #5

I'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.

Booking concert tickets seems to be a popular one: https://github.com/thomasms/glastoselenium

Re: Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium

#40

Post by merb »

sbierwagen wrote: post #37
bickeringyokel wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that new? I seem to remember never updating the driver even after chrome did it's auto updates and still having my code run. I use a managed service now so I don't have to sorry about that stuff

Chromedriver used to support three major releases of Chrome at a time, now it supports one: https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads This means all selenium scripts break every two months.

maybe it would be cool to create a "webdriver" that supports Puppeteer.
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