How To Tell if a Website is Down Before Opening it?

Help
1

One of the sites I need to connect to, goes completely offline at least once a month. When I type the URL into a browser it comes back with “This page can not be reached” type errors. Not even an error page from their server.

How can detect this before I try to open the page, as opening the page the usual way just crashes things out?

2

Hi @CarlNixon

What you can do is, once you do the open browser with the url, before performing any actions, you can use a get text activity or element exists activity to check whether it shows the page could not be loaded message.

Depending on that result you can perform the rest of the activities. This approach will allow you to run the process without crashing the sequence :slight_smile:

3

This isn’t advisable because whatever the timeout is from the activities would be time added to the process every time.

Instead, do so within a Pick activity with finding the error messages on a separate Pick Branch so that it can throw an exception instead of continuing on without effecting the speed of the process, especially if you’re doing this many times.