Difference between web and desktop recording

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1

I understand that Basic recording generates full selectors where as desktop generates partial selectors, but if I have to click a button on a web page, I am able to do that with desktop recording and if I have to click a button on desktop app, I am able to do that with web recording. My question here is why do we have different recordings if we are able to perform all the actions with any of the recording types.

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Hi @niteesh2004

Good question. Actually, all of these are quite similar in terms of the functionality. However, there is a slight difference :slight_smile:

As you may already know, when automating desktop applications or web applications, it creates containers. Containers in the cense, it is an activity that specifies what type of a window it is. For example, if its a desktop application, it creates “Open Application”, “Attach Window” activities which we use to perform activities related to that particular application window. If its a web application, open application and attach window is not what it generates. For web applications, it generates two different types of activities like “Open Browser” and “Attach Browser” activity. These activities are used when we are performing an web application loading in a browser and when we are performing different activities in a particular browser page.

You will also notice that these two activities do have some different properties which enables us to perform things in different ways.

As far as I can explain, that is the difference in these two types.

Did I answer your question bro?

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Lahiru,

Whatever the recording type may be (whether it is desktop or web) if the application is web, recorder generates attach browser, it is application specific not the recorder specific, so your explanation doesn’t still answer my question.

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Hi @niteesh2004

True in a way. I would agree on that as 50: 50 :slight_smile:
I would not say its application specific, but it is recorder specific.

My thought is, the focus of two types is to record the tasks performed in either desktop applications or in a web application. So, if you select desktop recording, in the recording tool bar that appear, it will have all the activities related to desktop automation as I have explained above. For example,
image
This shows “Start App” and “Close App” activities. But nothing related to opening a browser or closing a browser.

For web recording, it has all activities to open a browser, attach etc. But nothing related to opening desktop applications because for web automation the focus should be on activities that are required to perform things in the web application.
image
another example:
For desktop recording,
image
It shows the screen scraping
and for web recording, this has data scraping.
image

Of course, data scraping is under the text automation there. But the main highlight is for screen scraping because desktop uses that mostly. So the difference here is actually the activities that are required for the automation. Specially for opening and attaching windows. Everything else is similar like mouse clicks, typing images etc.

Well, I agree that one can argue that if all that is similar why not have them all in the same window so its easy to switch between whenever required. I believe the idea here is to simplify the things and to give focus only for the type of automation they want rather than having them all in one go.

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Lahiru,
This make more sense, thank you for pointing out the differences

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