Get Control for Web Forms

[ozhamlet]

I use ME for editing database records in an online system that has a browser-based frontend.  The postition of some controls can vary due to several factors.  As far as I can tell the Get Control command can't detect controls rendered within a web page.  Has anyone been able to do this using ME?

[Cory]

No controls. The whole "WebBrowser" that renders the page is one control. The controls in the rendered webpage are browser controls and not accessible to MEP.
I've done much of MEP isn't suited well for it. One must tab though the controls and enter as needed. Avoid using mouse commands as it's troublesome. And in any case navigation is troublesome and timing can be a nightmare. There are browser extension apps that do this better becasue they run programmatically in the browser, but most have a programming language to learn and are not as easy as MEP. 

I do much automation of web pages like what you're doing for clients and long ago I gave up and learned .NET so I could write programs to do this sort of thing. There are a few ways but mostly I don't even use a browser or browser control and instead send HTTP requests and process responses like the browser does. It's much simpler, more robust, and hundred of times faster than MEP, but one must know a programming language to do it.

If you have any interest, I'm available for hire or even to just give some free advice. Maybe even make you a simple app you could play with. 

But most can be done in MEP, it's just a pain. If you don't run big batches and just need to enter a couple pages of data, MEP could be viable with keyboard commands and some tricks I'll be happy to share. Maybe describe a little more and I can offer some ideas. 
Last thought... Many of the pages I automate connect to a Db like AWS. The scripts run in the web page but in the end they POST and receive data as one of the script driven requests and are often in JSON, XML, or other simple data format. Many of my programs just fire requests to the Db server directly and receive JSON data directly which I then parse and pump into my client's Db. 

[ozhamlet]

Cory, thanks for your detailed reply.  I've managed to get nearly all the repetitive tasks implemented in MEP.  All the edits of a record are done by opening subform windows that contain a subset of the fields.   About half of them need an initial positioning with the mouse to the top right corner of the subform followed by a hotkey activation and then using 'Relative to last position' moves.   When timing is variable, e.g. waiting for subforms to open or close, I use Pause | Resume (via the Enter key).

 

I might explore the browser extension and .NET options having programmed extensively in VBA, mainly in Access and Excel.  I've tried HTTP in another context but found it a bit like programming in assembly language; i.e. very labour intensive, particularly when negotiating with secure systems.

 

Thanks for your suggestions.

[Cory]

You're welcome