The problem with a drop-down list on the website

Good afternoon friends;
Please I would like you to help me with the following problem:

I have a robot that downloads files from a website, for this it has to select what it wants to download from a drop-down list. I use the “Type Into” activity and a list in .txt where the names of the files I want to download are.

The problem is that the drop-down list on the web page is auto-filled. So when I have the following filenames to download:

“NEO HOME”
“NEO”

What this website does is always autocomplete to the longest word, that is, “NEO HOME” and download the same file twice.

I tried in properties of the activity “TYPE INTO” which is called “EmptyField” but the problem persists. Also proble, “hotkey = esc” and the last thing, the activity “click” outside the drop-down list, but by default it takes me the name “NEO HOME”, immediately after I put the letter N.

Can you confirm you tried the Select activity? For drop-down we must use that first, what is the issue with that.

Hi rahul,

Yes, I also tried “select item”, but it can’t seem to scroll. Just read the first screen that shows the drop-down menu. I also tried “click” and “then select item”, I didn’t find a solution either.

Click and Select activity are not a good happy couple.

Select works 80% of the times actually, not sure about your target website. Is that an work/internal website? Or something you can share with us? That would help to understand and resolve this issue quicker.

One way to resolve this is using Click activity using dynamic selector using of Stimulate type. I am certain you can have the selector tuned in, have you given a try to use Stimulate type selection. You can check the checkbox that says ‘Stimulate Click’ of the click activity’s properties panel.

Other way is, if you press Neo then it selects the first list item always. You can have a get text on that drop-down and then compare if that is exactly equal to the one you need, if yes then proceed else again send the down arrow Hotkey to the drop-down, this eill select the second list item starting with Neo. This way you can make sure the item is correctly selected in the drop-down.
This way might but he ideal for all cases because the list can be long for few cases, but this can be considered for cases when the list item names are more than 32 character long and starting (32 character) part of many list items are same, selector won’t work in that cases.

Hope this helps!

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What I did to solve the problem was to use “Try Catch”, in “try” I put the “Select item” and in “catches” I put “Type into” it worked great for me. I suppose that each case has a different solution.

Thanks a lot

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Yes that’s a scenario based approach of trying until the right element is selected/clicked in case of many cases on the target application.

Glad the issue is resolved.

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