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[greenber]

I just downloaded a trial version of Automation Anywhere. I have two tasks I'm trying to automate, both involving my son's school website.

The first involves teachers' blogs, wherein each of his teachers post daily accounts of what happened in class that day as well as homework. Generally the list of blogs/teachers is static, but may vary a few times per school year as various electives appear and disappear. Each blog is freeform and may contain active links. Further, each blog looks like a ransom note with varying screen colors, font sizes, and seemingly random margins -- I guess blogs are where the teachers vent their creativity. Each blog entry for each teacher has a heading of the date.

What I do manually now is to create a blank Word document, cut and paste each blog into that Word document, homogenize all the fonts and colors as well as the font sizes, and save that word document.

What I'm interested in doing now is to automate that procedure and to save the Word document in an Access/mySQL database of some sort.

[forumsupport]

Hello,

Using Automation Anywhere , you can scrape data from any application not just web applications. For web data extraction, Automation Anywhere provides you with a powerful tool, Web Recorder. Web Recorder understands all web controls. If websites change and web controls move, Automation Anywhere will find the correct controls and the task will continue to work.

What you can do is:

1) Click on Web Recorder link or Tools->Web Recorder.
2) Enter the website and click on Start button. It will open a new browser for Internet Explorer.
3) Perform the activities that you want to automate like login to website, etc.
4) If your actions involve extracting tabular data then use the Extract Table button from the toolbar as displayed below. Most of the websites have their data organized in html tables and this feature makes it extremely easy and quick to extract the tabular data into a CSV or any other application.
5) If your actions involve extracting / copying other data like paragraphs etc. then use the Extract Data button from the toolbar. You can assign the copied text value to a variable from the list let’s say $my-variable$.
6) Click on 'Stop Recording' (Button visible in the Web recorder Bar at the top of the screen) to stop recording your activity.
7) Type your task name and click 'Save' to save the task. If you have purchased version, you can also specify a password to lock the task.
8) When you open the tasks created using Web Recorder in Task Editor (Tools->Task Editor), you will see all the Web Recorder commands related to the controls you worked with while recording for e.g. links, text boxes, drop down menus etc.
9) A task created using Web Recorder is not restricted to only Web Recorder commands. You can edit your task and insert other actions to perform required action. For e.g. the data that you extracted can be pasted into any application lets say MS Word or MS Access.

You can use Database command to connect to your database and issue SQL queries or INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE statements. You can find Database command under 'Appliaction' command category.

We have attached two sample tasks for you. Please copy them under location, 'C:\...\My Documents\Automation Anywhere\Automation Anywhere\My Tasks' folder. Copy sample.mdb under C:\.

WebDataExtract.atmn will extract data from web into MS Word and DataTransferfromWeb2Database.atmn will extract data from web into sample.mdb database.

Hope that helps. Can you please reply to following questions so that we can help you more with specific task?
• What website you want to extract the data?
• What are the steps we need to follow to go to the page where the data is?
• What pieces of data you want to extract?

[greenber]

sorry for the delay in responding: I "lost" this forum and only rediscovered it today. I'll try what you suggest and get back to you promptly!

Thank you.

Ross

[greenber]

no luck, unfortunately. I even tried your example -- no luck there either. For your example I extracted all files to a folder on my desktop and tried running it from there. IE opens up -- 2 copies in fact -- and then I get an error message about line 2. I'm running Vista Ultimate -- is it possible that this is a Vista problem?
Ross

[forumsupport]

Hello,

Can you please try this, in IE window, under Tools->Internet Options click on Security tab. At the bottom of Internet Option window, you will find one checkbox to turn On/off protected mode (see attached screenshot). You need to uncheck that checkbox.

Now, run the task again.

Hope that helps