Find items on a page

Owned by ZL Support
Last updated: Oct 19, 2021
3 min read

Table of contents

Before you can interact with an element on the page, you need to find it. In the Get Value, Set Value, Rise Event, Touch Event, Swipe Event actions, there are two ways to find items - classic and using XPath.

Classic - Search by HTML element parameters: tag, attribute and its value.

 

 

 

 

XPath - Search using XPath expressions . With the help of it you can implement a more versatile and resistant to layout changes way of data search in comparison with classic search or regular expressions.

 

Which tab

Select the tab on which the item will be searched.
Possible values:

  • Active tab

  • First

  • By name - when you select this item, an input field for the name of the tab will appear.

  • By number - in the entry field you will need to enter the serial number of the tab (numbering starts from zero!)

Document

It is recommended to set the value -1 (search in all documents on the page). 

Form

It is also better to set -1 (search in all forms on the page). Choosing this value will make the template more versatile.

Example: on page 3 of the form - search, registration, ordering goods. We need to click on the button in the order form and we have chosen as the value of the “Form” field - 2 (numbering from zero). After some time, a new login form appears on the site, and it is inserted in front of the order form. Number 2 will now be the login form, and our template will either give an error that the button was not found, or (much worse) will click on another button in another form.

In the program settings, you can select two checkboxes - Search all forms on the page and Search all documents on page, and then always when adding an element to the Action Designer, the document number and form will be set to -1.

Tag (classic search only)

The actual HTML tag from which you want to get the value.

You can specify several tags at once, the separator is; (semicolon)

Conditions (classic search only)

  1. Group - the priority of this condition. The higher this number, the lower the priority. If we could not find an element by the condition with the highest priority, then go to the condition with the next priority, and so on until the element is found, or until the search conditions are over. You can add several conditions with the same priority, then the search will be performed for all conditions with the same priority at the same time. 

  2. Attribute - HTML attribute of the tag by which the search is performed.

  3. Search type :

    1. text - search by full or partial text occurrence;

    2. notext - search for elements that do not contain the specified text;

    3. regexp - search using regular expressions
      By default RegeXp search is case insensitive. To change it you can prepend (?-i) to your expression (this mean “disable case insensitive mode”).

  4. Value - the value of the HTML tag attribute

  5. Match # - the ordinal number of the found element (numbering from zero!). Ranges and variable macros can be used in this field.

To delete a search term, left-click on the field to the left of it (highlighted in blue in the screenshot) and press the delete button on the keyboard.

It is always important to try to select search conditions in such a way that only one element remains, i.e. the serial number was 0 (numbering from zero).