Make 'Find Element' activity support Object Repository

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“Find Element” appears to not have been updated to support elements from the Object Repository yet, it would be great if this is corrected in future versions.

The activity is useful because it differs from the Check App State in which it raises an exception if the element is not found. I find that a good use case is in Pick Branches, where you can’t have a branch running even though the element was not found.

Adding a workaround for the boolean outputted by Check App State in the Action field or not leveraging Object Repository in Find Element just doesn’t feel right.

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There are a lot of activities that don’t support Object Repository well, and Object Respository objects don’t support variables well (like using a variable for the URL in Use App/Browser).

And updating all the automations that use a repository is a painstaking manual process.

All of this combined makes Object Repository basically unusable for us.

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I just started trying it out now, so maybe I haven’t encountered many issues yet, besides personal adaptation and this one.

I believe the update process will be much easier when using Object Repository as a Library though, without it, there is much more work to be done (correcting selectors in many activities spread across many projects).

I was able to use variables for the URL in Use App/Browser, but barely. Here’s how I did it:

  1. Leave Browser URL empty on the Screen object
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  2. Use the variable you want in the URL parameter of the Unified Application Target section. This seems to do nothing, so I’m doing something wrong or this is broken as well.
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  3. Use a “Go to URL” first thing in the Do scope. This is necessary because otherwise the browser is open at the New Tab page and stays there forever.
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Basically the only thing the object in the repository should hold is the selector. It shouldn’t hold all the properties of the activity.

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8

Just an update: Release 2022.4 probably made things easier, since the support for variables seems to be improved, as detailed in Store variables’ default value in Object Repository elements.

Didn’t have the time to test it yet though.