After recording a flow and running it the next steps never happen, it just highlights them and does nothing

[norton287]

I recorded several flows and the only execute the first step and then just step through highlighting the remainder but not actually performing what they are supposed to do.  It is a simple flow of just clicking on three icons.

John

[Ahammad_Riyaz]

Hi @norton287 ,

It may be selector changing everytime or else just give wait nd check it once.

Thnaks

Ahammad Riyaz

[norton287]

I'm not following... What do you mean by selector changing every time?

John

[norton287]

Is anyone able to explain why this might be happening?  I am not understanding this other guy and he did not respond to my question.  Any help would be appreciated!

[tkuehara]

Hi @norton287 

What he said is that sometimes you might deal with dynamic selectors, meaning flows might work only once and then doesn't work anymore (because the element id/name changed). However, it doesn't seem to be your case as you said that the flow doesn't raise any error: it keeps running but no action is performed.

If you could provide a print screen from your flow it would be helpful.

[norton287]

Here is the flow I am working on now, it does not do the last step where it is supposed to mouse click.  It never moves the mouse to that location or even tries to do a click.

John

[Pavel_NaNoi]

Doesn't do the last part because you're selecting the virtual machine, but PAD has no control inside the VM as its installed on your local one, so it is clicking but on your local machine not inside the VM. What you need is image recognition (or what we call computer vision) just use the "Move mouse to image" action in PAD instead, it will do exactly what you want.

[norton287]

Tried that, the same happens does not move the mouse or click at all and never throws an error

John

[tkuehara]

Didn't know you were using a VM. I ran a test with Remote Desktop and move mouse action works in it. Have no idea why it doesn't work with VMware.

[Pavel_NaNoi · Accepted solution]

Hmm weird, try running PAD in admin mode just in-case, and just to make sure, when using the image action, you're selecting like a box around the image, not just a pixel of it right? (This can easily happen, I'm just being thorough) 

Another thing you can do is to use OCR to find the text of the application and move mouse to that location and send a double click, this method will require you to make sure your VM is not in focus as a window though. And if that doesn't work then it might be an issue with the VM just in general (I've tested several of these things in the Azure one and they seem to work fine)

[Jon112]

I have noticed that if Power Automate isn't running in administrative mode and the program is that can cause some issues. Where it will select the program, but it won't actually do any of the actions associated with it as it doesn't have necessary permissions. The work around for me was to set both the program and power automate to run in compatibility mode as administrator. Though I'm not sure if that is the issue as I haven't worked with power automate much with a VM.

[norton287]

I finally got around to it but running it as Admin worked perfectly!  Thank all you guys for your feedback and advice!

John