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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.




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 ...


What software is generally used for this? Is there anything available for the average person that doesn’t require spending a small fortune?


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.


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.


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


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


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


Chromedriver used to support three major releases of Chrome at a time, now it supports one: https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads This means all selenium scripts break every two months.


maybe it would be cool to create a "webdriver" that supports Puppeteer.


> "automating boring stuff using Selenium"

With an Appendix for the sites that block using Selenium.




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