Checking Element in website before downloading.

[nsmancini]

Ignore my spelling for my English is not too good. I have made a PAD flow that clicks a download link button every day and saves the  file on my computer. On the download button there is a date that shows if the file has been updated to the current day. How could I add a step that checks if this date is the current date. I attached a photo below of what the download button looks like. Thanks for your help

[MichaelAnnis]

I would try to "Get details of web page" and see if you can't extract the date (it has to be part of that element somewhere).  A last resort would OCR, but I would avoid this.

Are there dates available on the output file that could give you this determination.  For example, if this is Excel, and the date always appears in A5, then I would just download it anyways and use that date to run this validation, because that is going to be much easier to set up.

[nsmancini]

Thanks Michael for the quick reply and taking time to help. I have tried using the get details option but still not having any luck. I was thinking maybe you could make that date a variable somehow and check to see if it was updated using a if statement or some minor programming. 

[MichaelAnnis]

Can you inspect it, and show us the source code.  It has to be in there somewhere.

[MichaelAnnis]

Can you inspect it, and show us the source code.  It has to be in there somewhere.

[nsmancini]

I copied the element and pasted below. Thanks again for your help Michael.

<span class="time">January 11, 2022</span>

[MichaelAnnis · Accepted solution]

So, this page is a great example of what you should be able to do.  At the bottom of the page is a list of related topics and to the right is the date.  Here is a phot of the date with the related source code:

I was able to 'Launch new Chrome' and attach to this window, then use 'Get details of element on web page' to extract the date. 

So, here are your steps:

1. Add 'Get details of element on web page' to your flow
2. Make sure the right Browser Instance variable is in the top dropdown
3. For UI element, click in there, and go to 'Add New UI element' (you should see a popup screen)
4. Hover over the Liverpool Report download button, Hold CTRL and Left Click
   1. This will add the UI element to the popup window
5. Click Done on the popup window
6. Save 'Get details of element'

Try to rerun it, and let's see what %AttributeValue% gets us.  Share the text with me here.  After that, it will probably just be using the text features to capture the date by itself.