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Only downside is that you can't drive old IE and mobile browsers except for Firefox for Android.
There 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.
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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?
There are a handful of open source RPA tools, but I don’t think there’s a breakthrough project yet.
Selenium leaves trace in HTTP requests, so its use is quite detectable. The authors of PeopleSoft can include Selenium detection in their products, disallowing your automation scripts. Why not use GreaseMonkey instead?
Do you have any more information about this trace in HTTP requests? My understanding was that it was the _browser_ doing the requests; Selenium was just driving the browser.
"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.
No surprise that it is backed by Oracle. The sales people at Oracle are really good at getting technology inept people/businesses into multi year contracts. Once they started citing the list of features in their hundred slide presentation, the administrator stood no chance.
The problem is that these products started out much smaller, and grew to fill the needs, although not necessarily as nicely as you might like. So now when it's time to put out a new bid, there's just the handful of vendors who can check off all the boxes for what the current system does. And integration with other systems is always a pain - even today it often includes csv or tab-delimited files that get sent to ftp sites for batch processing!
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.
With an Appendix for the sites that block using Selenium.
#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 People…
What kind of system? I had thought that selenium was created to TDD web development front-end.
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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?
They have a pretty limited use case though.
I would love to hear any more you have to say about the genetic algorithms you use to help with scheduling.
Ah yes, the genetric algorithm (GA). Well, in short, scheduling personnel is a very visible, policital, and important job. It affects people's lives, and has to be done farily and correctly. I did my best (by hand) for a few years (scheduling 50ish professors into 200 class sections), and I knew I was doing a bad job, but had no choice. It would take 2 weeks to do, because I could only mentally handle working on such…
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If anyone happens to know of a particularly good article on this for non-javascript (but technical) people, please post.
Please clarify--are you looking to understand how browser events work without learning about the DOM and/or Javascript?