Downloading PDFs in Studio X

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1

One of the major publishing houses, made a few hundred text books available for free download. I compiled a list of books that interested me (about 100) and noted their URLs in an excel spreadsheet. Having recently completed the Reboot Your Skillsprogram, this seemed like an opportunity to try RPA for this task. I wanted to use a robot to iterate over the list, open each URL, download the file and move to the next item. I felt that recording the action once and putting it inside a For Each Excel activity should do the job. Here are the issues I encountered:

  1. The recorder doesn’t seem to want to work with Edge, so I had to switch to Chrome. Can the UIPath team please look into why the recorder doesn’t work with Edge?

  2. It seems browsers handle PDFs differently than other file types, in the sense that instead of downloading the file, they directly open the PDF from the server in the browser. Can future updates please include an option to specify a URL in the Download File activity, so that we can eliminate the manual steps?

  3. Related to point 2 above, once the PDF is open in the browser, when you hover, a toolbar appears on the page where you can click the save button and choose further options to complete the download. I couldn’t find a way to specify hovering and clicking the button the dynamic toolbar. Attached image should provide some context on what I’m talking about
    Toolbar

  4. I ended up using the robot to only go through the list and open the URL. I added a delay between each row to allow me time to do the other tasks manually. It was still faster than me having to do everything manually, but I’m reaching out to the community because there has to be a better way of doing this.

Thanks
Aalok

2

Hi.

  1. Note the image please.
    image
    image715Ă—429 18.6 KB
3

Hi

I already have the Edge extension installed and active. Regular automations using Edge work fine, just the recorder refuses to recognize Edge windows.

4

Is there anyone who can answer this please?

5

I create a fast workflow where it hovers over the pdf download bar and then save the pdf to the hard-drive. But i used the chrome browser, and it works fine… attached the workflow. (note the saving part of the work flow are with danish indicators so it want work with other languages change the indicators first)

hover.xaml (13.9 KB)

Let me know if you want further elaboration on this solution.

6

We will consider you proposal to accept an URL, directly in the StudioX DownloadFile activity.
Just as quick workaround, there is an option in Chrome to control the behavior around PDF files, in “Setttings”:

image
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3 Likes
7

Hi Thomas

I’m not sure how to use your XAML. I tried renaming it to Main.xaml in a blank project and using it, didn’t work. I tried opening it in Studio instead of Studio X and it gave many, many errors.

I tried creating another project to use chrome and the Hover activity, but the hover is not able to recognize the target.

Conceptually I know what to do:

  1. Hover in the pane.
  2. Click on the Download Button.
  3. Click on the Save button in the download dialog box.

But I can’t do any of that if the Hover refuses to work.