Trouble with a Timer Countdown on the Web

[ZFalcon]

I have been trying to create a task which would seem to be very simple, but is driving me crazy. I am trying to write a script to watch a timer that continuously counts down on a website, and make an audible sound when it hits a specified time so I can be made aware of the auction ending soon.

What I thought would work is really simple:

Loop While Web Control Does Not Exist[ Division Value : 00:02:00 ] in the webpage "http://www.ubid.com/(the item)"
End Loop
Play Beep

When I run this I don't even see the webpage open at all.

This doesn't seem to keep doing the loop routine until the condition is met and I don't understand why. When I try to step through it, over and over it just does step one and never even gets to the end loop. It appears to not even look at the webpage and just end.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[forumsupport]

Hello,

We need to first open the webpage using 'Open Browser' command and then navigate to the page where that particular control exists.

Is it possible for you to provide URL of website so we can create a sample as per the requirement?

[ZFalcon]

Thank you for the reply. There are multiple sites I wanted to do this for, but the one in the example in this thread is www .ubid .com. After you go to that page, click on any of the items and you will see the timer counting down, which is the one that I wanted to play an audio beep if the clock hits 2 minutes.

[forumsupport]

Hello,

In this scenario, what we can do is, extract the countdown value into user variable and loop while it is greater than or equal to 00:02:00 i.e. 2 mins.
We have attached a sample task for reference. Please copy it under location, 'C:\...\My Documents\Automation Anywhere\Automation Anywhere\My Tasks' folder.

Hope that helps.

[ZFalcon]

Thank you very much for the help!

I was curioius when creating scripts like this that continuously loop to see if certain criteria are met from the web, is it completely passive and only looking at data that is sent to your computer by the website just for being on the page, or does the program actively request updates for this information from the server?

I'm guessing it is completely passive to not put undue strain on the server and just takes the data being sent from the webpage normally, but wanted to ask.

The second question I had was is there any way to set this to just look at the timer on the "active web page"? I didn't know if the script could be modified so I can manually go to an auction in my browser window and run the script without having to recreate the script each time for every new auction? The way it is right now, I need to recreate it each time and didn't see a way to just tell it "active web page" anywhere.

The only way I can think of to do active web page would be with the copy to clipboard technique mentioned elsewhere in these forums, but I don't always want to lose what I may have on the clipboard from other applications to use that technique.

[forumsupport]

Hello,

Yes, it is passive, extracting data from a webpage in real time. With Web Recorder commands, unfortunately, currently it is not possible however, you can use clipboard for the same purpose. Before you copy, you can save the contents of clipboard to some other user variable say Temp using 'Clipboard:Assign from Clipboard' command then clear the clipboard and copy the contents of active webpage. Create another user variable say Temp2 and copy the current clipboard contain to it. Finally, using 'Clipboard:Assign to Clipboard' command copy Temp value back to clipboard.

Hope that helps.