Scraping Data From A Windows Application

[BotAM97 (Robot)]

Hello everyone,

My issue is that I currently have a windows application that once queried returns back results in a structured table. These are results that I need to put back into a Data Table within UiPath in order to further manipulate the data.

Data Scraping does not work as it is a windows application and not a website.
I tried Extract Structured Data activity in screen scraping section and the problem is the ExtractMetadata input within that activity was not pre-populated with the XML that UiPath usually generates and I am not sure how to manually generate it.

Any help would be appreciated

Thank you,

Alex Mansur

[Srini84 (Srinivas Kadamati)]

Hi @BotAM97

Can you post a screen and what are trying to achieve?
So that it will helpful for us to help you

Thanks

[BotAM97 (Robot)]

Hi Ksrinu,

Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately, I cannot screenshot my exact work due to the sensitive nature of the information but I can maybe share a generic photo from the web that would depict the same thing that I am trying to do.

So in the example below. Imagine that this is my application and the results are returned in that format/structure.

[Palaniyappan (Palaniyappan P)]

Hi
Is there any option there in your application to export that as a excel file
Cheers @BotAM97

[BotAM97 (Robot)]

I wish - unfortunately, due to the ancient nature of this application, there is no export to excel button.

I am also trying to do a Copy and Paste into a Data Table but I am not sure if I am doing it correctly.

[Palaniyappan (Palaniyappan P)]

Awesome
If you can select the complete datatable then copy paste would work for sure

The steps involved will be like
Once the application shows the output use a SEND HOT KEY ACTIVITY with key as ctrl+a
Then use another SEND HOT KEY activity with key as ctrl+c
Now it will be moved to clipboard

Then use a START PROCESS activity and there mention the filepath of the excel we want to save with as input to FileName property

This will open the excel file in foreground
Now use a SEND HOT KEY activity with key as ctrl+home
Here just use hot key alone and don’t select
Any element for selector

Then use a final SEND HOT KEY activity with key as ctrl+v again with hot key alone and no element chosen

This will paste the data to excel

Cheers @BotAM97

[BotAM97 (Robot)]

@Palaniyappan

Y activi

Excellent - is there a way to skip the excel and just dump it into a Data Table from the clipboard?

[Palaniyappan (Palaniyappan P)]

ofcourse we can
once after copying and saving it to clipboard
use a activity named GET FROM CLIPBOARD which will give us output in a form of string
–then use GENERATE DATATABLE activity where pass this string variable as input and get the output as datatable

Cheers @BotAM97

[BotAM97 (Robot)]

I am going to submit this as the solution but I am still running into the issue of selecting everything in the application using the hot keys. any suggestions?

Thank you,