Best RPA tips and tricks

I’ve had the pleasure of working on Python RPA scripts, focusing on automation and data extraction from both modern and legacy web applications.

Two key takeaways were that automating and extracting data from modern web applications is relatively straightforward, but working with older, more complex applications presented some unique challenges.

1. Driver.cookies() this function helps to take the current cookies of the tab and we can reuse the same cookies to hit the api endpoint (which contains the data we need). By this we can reduce the automation process and scrap the data faster and effectively.

def get_hash_value(customer_id,document_id):
    cookies = driver.get_cookies()
    cookie_string=""
    #this loop sets the necessary cookies
    for cookie in cookies:
        cookie_string+=cookie['name']+'='+cookie['value']+'; '
    headers = {
        'authority': 'www.example.com',
        'accept': 'application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01',
        'accept-language': 'en-US,en;q=0.9',
        'content-type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8',
        'cookie': cookie_string,
        'origin': 'https://qa.devfovea.com',
        'referer': 'https://www.example.com/secret',
        'sec-ch-ua': '"Chromium";v="116", "Not)A;Brand";v="24", "Google Chrome";v="116"',
        'sec-ch-ua-mobile': '?0',
        'sec-ch-ua-platform': '"Windows"',
        'sec-fetch-dest': 'empty',
        'sec-fetch-mode': 'cors',
        'sec-fetch-site': 'same-origin',
        'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.0.0 Safari/537.36',
        'x-requested-with': 'XMLHttpRequest',
    }
    data = {
    'querystring': f'CustId={customer_id}&DocumentId={document_id}',
    }
    url = 'https://www.example.com/GetHashedValue'
    response = requests.post(url, headers=headers, data=data)
    if response.status_code == 200:
        return response.json()
    else:
        print(f"Request failed with status code {response.status_code}")

2.To Extract specific datas from a table, You can find the particular table element. And iterate the the table through values

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

# Initialize the WebDriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome()  # Ensure chromedriver is in your PATH

# Navigate to the webpage
url = 'https://example.com/page-with-table'  # Replace with the target URL
driver.get(url)

# Locate the table by its ID
table = driver.find_element(By.ID, 'example-table')  # Replace with the actual ID of the table

# Extract table rows
rows = table.find_elements(By.TAG_NAME, 'tr')

# Initialize a list to store table data
table_data = []

# Loop through each row and extract cell data
for row in rows:
    # Extract cell data from each row
    cells = row.find_elements(By.TAG_NAME, 'td')
    cell_data = [cell.text for cell in cells]
    table_data.append(cell_data)

# Print the extracted data
for row in table_data:
    print(row)

# Close the WebDriver
driver.quit()

3.The last one but useful one. Whenever I get stuck in writing scripts for an old and shabby websites I use selenium webdriver extension and record the actions and clicks and export to python script. You can find the selenium webdriver extension in chrome webstore.