3 ms·

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

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.

sleet 6y ago
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 ...
- halo 6y ago
  What software is generally used for this? Is there anything available for the average person that doesn’t require spending a small fortune?
  - janstice 6y ago
    Uipath and automation anywhere seem to be big players with community/free starter editions. PWC (who are spearheading the RPA at $work) seem to have decreed that all their staff are going to use uipath worldwide. There are a handful of open source RPA tools, but I don’t think there’s a breakthrough project yet.
  - mahalol 6y ago
    Azure LogicApps are good for these kind of silly integrations, if it has a connector for it then it's a piece of cake. They have a pretty limited use case though.
sbierwagen 6y ago
The fact that you have to update Chromedriver with every Chrome release now doesn't make things easier.
- bickeringyokel 6y ago
  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
  - sbierwagen 6y ago
    Chromedriver used to support three major releases of Chrome at a time, now it supports one: https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads This means all selenium scripts break every two months.
    - merb 6y ago
      maybe it would be cool to create a "webdriver" that supports Puppeteer.
gadders 6y ago
Booking concert tickets seems to be a popular one: https://github.com/thomasms/glastoselenium https://github.com/thomasms/glastoselenium
xtiansimon 6y ago
> "automating boring stuff using Selenium" With an Appendix for the sites that block using Selenium.

sleet 6y ago

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 ...

halo 6y ago
What software is generally used for this? Is there anything available for the average person that doesn’t require spending a small fortune?
- janstice 6y ago
  Uipath and automation anywhere seem to be big players with community/free starter editions. PWC (who are spearheading the RPA at $work) seem to have decreed that all their staff are going to use uipath worldwide. There are a handful of open source RPA tools, but I don’t think there’s a breakthrough project yet.
- mahalol 6y ago
  Azure LogicApps are good for these kind of silly integrations, if it has a connector for it then it's a piece of cake. They have a pretty limited use case though.

sbierwagen 6y ago

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

bickeringyokel 6y ago
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
- sbierwagen 6y ago
  Chromedriver used to support three major releases of Chrome at a time, now it supports one: https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads This means all selenium scripts break every two months.
  - merb 6y ago
    maybe it would be cool to create a "webdriver" that supports Puppeteer.

gadders 6y ago

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

xtiansimon 6y ago

> "automating boring stuff using Selenium" With an Appendix for the sites that block using Selenium.