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Vba internet explorer document reference library code#
'name: name of the html element isBlocking: is the code to be blocked until the element is found index: index of the element in the array of elements with this name Public Function GetElementByName(name As String, Optional isBlocking As Boolean, Optional index As Long) Set objIE = New InternetExplorer: objIE.Visible = isVisible: objIE.Navigate urlAddress 'urlAddress: destination url isVisible: should the IE window be visible Public Sub Navigate(urlAddress As String, isVisible As Boolean)
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'!!!Please reference in Tools->References "Microsoft Internet Controls library"!!!Ĭonst maxTimeout As Long = 10000 'Max time in milliseconds to wait until a control is found before raising error It is much easier and once you get the hand of it, it really makes life easier. I prefer regular expressions over any other methods for extracting contents from strings/web pages and I encourage you to do so too. One other interesting thing is the GetRegex method which I basically scrapped of my Excel Scrape HTML Add-In. This code has proven deterministic for me in over 1’000 tested queries! Why is it there? Because we need to be sure that the browser has at least mostly loaded the new content and that the element we are looking for is not found, by mistake, in the previous page content. You might have noticed the there is still a method called WaitForIE which actually still waits for the browser to confirm that it is not Busy anymore. All the blocking/waiting is handled in the Get* methods which will simply wait until the control is available in the Web Browser or raise an error otherwise if the maxTimeout threshold is breached. That’s 10 lines of code and not hassle with handling the accessibility of any web elements. IeClass.WaitForIE 'First wait for the page to mostly load IeClass.GetElementByTagName("form").Submit IeClass.GetElementByName("q").Value = query The IE class I wrote handles queries to the Google Web Page like this:ĭim linkText as String, query as String: query = "Dog Wikipedia" The Google web page is also not an easy task for browser automation, assuming you would not embed your query in the GET params but treat it like a regular web page where all data is to be input and handled by forms. A simple class for deterministic browser automationīrowser automation requires usually a lot of coding and in order to provide the deterministic automation we need we would need to encapsulate more procedures for getting elements by id, name, tagname, classname and even regular expressions. This I believe is an honest way out of this conundrum. This threshold is there to prevent us from waiting for an infinite period of time in case the web page crashed etc. The 5 millisecond Sleep interval is simply there so we are able to specify an upper threshold for an error to appear on a web page (10 seconds). The code above waits for the element with id to appear accessible on the web page. 'This will wait maxTimeout miliseconds until raising an error or return
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(Err.Number 0 Or (GetElementById Is Nothing)) And _ If IIf(IsMissing(isBlocking), True, isBlocking) And _ 'id: id of the html element isBlocking: is the code to be blocked until the element is found Public Function GetElementById(id As String, Optional isBlocking As Boolean) See an example function below that will wait until the element is accessible on the web page and only then will it return it. My answer? Wait until the element appears accessible. This workaround, although somewhat useful, in most cases will be unsatisfactory as still does not guarantee that you will actually be able to access a web element or click a button that simply might not be loaded yet due to some JavaScript running in the background. One way of going around this problem is using arbitrary delays – leveraging Application.OnTime / Application.Wait / Sleep. The problem is, however, that although IE might state that it has fully loaded the web page this in fact does not always have to be the case and some code might generate errors at random lines of code. 'The row below may sometimes raise an error! While (objIE.Busy Or objIE.READYSTATE READYSTATE.READYSTATE_COMPLETE) Most browser automation code out there includes the following lines of code whenever waiting for the Internet Explorer browser control to finish loading or refreshing: Be sure to checkout my VBA Web Scraping Kit which includes a whole worth of VBA scripts for Web Scraping The problem