Replacing ExtractDataTable every browser session

Scenario:

Using an in-house webapp, the automation requires extracting structured data. This is within an attach browser which is only set to the title of the page and the browser type (chrome), so it shouldn’t mind the fact that the URI tends to change due to PHP, as the title of the page does not. Trying to view the selector from the appropriate web page even immediately after using the data scraping wizard throws an error saying that the selector cannot be found, but the automation still works as expected. The issue is that when I try to run the exact same automation the next day, the data scraping will not work. There is the same problem when I publish and send the .nupkg or .xaml to a coworker with both studio and robot installed. This has not been an issue thus far as all processes to be automated get filtered through me or him, but in the future we will have people expecting to be able to run these automations with a published package and only the robot installed, and I am afraid there may be no way to get it to work for them.

In addition, there are often artifacts from earlier data scrapes that appear when re-running the data scraping wizard. This has not significantly impacted the success of the automation as the previous entry’s response is always relegated to the bottom of the table and can be worked around, but I wonder if the problems are somehow connected.

Steps to reproduce:

Run data scraping wizard. Select a cell in a table, when it asks if you want to extract the whole table click yes. Once the Extract DataTable activity is created, select the activity and expand the target option submenu. Click the “…” to open the ui selector popup, click either open in ui explorer or attach to live element, error will be thrown

Again, this is not immediately a problem, as the extraction still works as it did in the wizard, but closing and opening both uipath studio and google chrome, or attempting to publish the automation and run on another computer causes the extract data table activity to fail.

Current Behavior:

Unpredictable extract DataTable activity

Expected Behavior:

If the selectors and operating conditions are valid, (using chrome, appropriate web page, updated JDK and .NET, UiPath extension installed and updated with full permissions).

Studio/Robot/Orchestrator Version:

Studio 2017.1.6435
Microsoft Windows 7 Enterprise N 64-Bit
.NET 4.0.30319.42000

Thanks @tjsauter. I was having a similar problem of non-stable data scraping and after reading your approach and trying to extract the data multiple times within a retry scope loop it finally worked!