Automation running time and failure

[mumin]

Hi everyone,

I am trying to automize filling out tax form 5227 which has several pages.

I don’t know if the picture will show but it is an interactive PDF online form with some part of coding. So for the coding part, I have been extracting data from Excel to Form 5227.

My first question is, when I run the automation, it takes too long(3-4 minutes to fill 8blanks). When I use “type into”, I selected “image selection” to set up an anchor and target because the program wouldn’t recognize empty blanks on the form. I think this might be why it’s so slow but I am not sure. Is there a better way to handle this part?

Second question is, when automation tries to fill a blank that is not currently displayed on the monitor, it halts the automation (ex. after finishing filling up the first page, it would wait for me to manually scroll down to the second page to resume automation). Is there a way to solve this problem?
Thank you in advance team!

[Rahul_Unnikrishnan]

Hello,

For the First point the slowness maybe due to the selectors or due to the loading issue. You can make sure you are using proper selectors with anchors(if needed you can recors the form filling with App/Web recorder.

For the Point 2, If there is a button to scroll you can use a click activity. Else try to send hotkeys (keypress down arrow). After that add the steps to fill the second form

[mumin]

Thank you for the swift answer. I tried other selectors but they don’t seem to work…I want target to be those blue blanks in the form and anchor to be the description for the box but the program doesn’t do a good job with recognizing both. Is App/Web recorder usually fast?

[Rahul_Unnikrishnan]

It works with an anchor base only but the flow which gets created will be faster. You can record a part of the process and verify the performance.

[mumin]

What do you mean by anchor base only? Sorry, I am new to this “coding” language.

[Rahul_Unnikrishnan]

Hello,

In the below image you can see the Text field(Green) is anchored with close x(Blue)…
So the Blue element is the anchor. In the automation, while entering the Text field it will try to verify the text box along with the anchor it’s tagged.

It will be more helpful if you have multiple same kinds of elements. For example, while filling a New joiner form which is having many input fields.

[mumin]

This is what happens when I try to set a target to a textbox in this form.

It is basically the same with other selectors. Do you a suggestion?

[Rahul_Unnikrishnan]

Hello,

This is the first step. You are initializing the element to automate.
After clicking on this page keep on recording a few other elements. Then it will select individual elements.

App/Web recorder works on a neural technology method. So it will identify all the elements which are identifiable, but we need to first indicate the page to automate.

[mumin]

After I click broader areas on page one, I don’t think it’s identifying all those blanks… Could you help me here

[Rahul_Unnikrishnan]

Will it be possible to share that document which you are trying to automate

[mumin]

I can’t upload the file here. So this is the URL https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f5227.pdf
Or you can just type “form 5227” and it will pop up under IRS. Once you go to the document, you will see bunch of “blue blanks” which I wish to fill in using data from excel file. Thank you in advance

[mumin]

Hi Rahul,

Thank you in advance. I have attached the form in this email

f5227.pdf (305 KB)

[Rahul_Unnikrishnan]

Hello,

Please see the attached workflow. You can build on that.

ActivityDemo.zip (279.8 KB)

[mumin]

Thank you so much for the help!