How can I scrape an element that may or may not be present and then skip to the next part of my process?

UI.Vision RPA HowTo
1

Let’s say I’m trying to scrape some category labels of different blog posts and save them individually to a CSV line.

Each blog post might have one to five categories stored individually in this element:

//article/a

So, to find each category value I can add increments to this Xpath like this:

//article/a[1]
//article/a[2]
//article/a[3]
//article/a[4]
//article/a[5]

However, if a given blog post only has one category, this means that ui.vision will waste quite a bit of time searching for the other four categories that don’t exist and also return several #LNF values in my CSV file.

Is there a way to tell ui.vision something like:

“If //article/a[2] isn’t found, don’t bother looking for //article/a[3], //article/a[4], etc. Just skip to the next part of the scraping process. Also, don’t log #LNF for any category you couldn’t find.”

I’m guessing there are probably a few ways to do this, so I appreciate any workarounds the community here can offer.

Thanks!

2

If //article/a[2] isn’t found, then the result will be "#LNF => You can check on this result, and then use IF/THEN to skip the //article/a[3] (etc) searches.

2 Likes
3

Thanks @ulrich

I tried using GotoIf_V2 to jump to a label outside my ${!times} loop if “#LNF” appears in my csvLine, however it doesn’t seem to be working. Could you kindly offer some guidance on what I’m doing wrong. My steps look like this:

{
  "Command": "times",
  "Target": "5",
  "Value": "",
  "Description": ""
},
{
  "Command": "storeText",
  "Target": "//article/a[${!times}]",
  "Value": "!csvLine",
  "Description": ""
},
{
  "Command": "gotoIf_v2",
  "Target": "${!csvLine} == \"#LNF\"",
  "Value": "HERE",
  "Description": ""
},
{
  "Command": "end",
  "Target": "${!times}",
  "Value": "",
  "Description": ""
},
{
  "Command": "label",
  "Target": "HERE",
  "Value": "",
  "Description": ""
},

Thanks again.