Frustration project: Automate data entry into PeopleSoft with Selenium

#FunFact: I started the Selenium project. My first job out of college was at PeopleSoft. I left PeopleSoft and went &quot;in-house&quot; as the PeopleSoft admin at ThoughtWorks. A few years later, Selenium came out as a side-project for another internal system we needed. <i>But</i> when we were rolling out Selenium and dreaming up &quot;world domination plans&quot;, one of my mine was to get a copy of Selenium to ship with every copy of PeopleSoft (supplanting the free copy of SQA Robot that PeopleSoft shipped by default). Anyway, I never really pursued that particular &quot;plan&quot;, but here we are.

Another +1 for Selenium. I used it to bag tickets for a show I wanted to see. The seller’s site was terrible and apparently had no protection against ticket spinners so all 5,000 tickets sold out in minutes. Fortunately their resale site also had no protection at all so it was easy to write something to reload the page often and put tickets into my shopping cart as soon as they became available. When that happened it notified me and handed back control for me to enter the credit card details (I was too lazy to automate it all). I’m not proud of this brute force approach but if the reseller’s site wasn’t so awful to start with it wouldn’t be necessary.

&quot;Peoplesoft is a curse on humanity&quot;<p>I would love to know the story of how this wretched piece of software seems to have embedded itself into nearly every college and university in the United States.

There is an entire class of business problems that can be solved using Selenium.<p>I don’t love that raw http connections are the universal API, but at least it’s a tool in our belts when these companies provide lackluster or zero proper interfaces.

Love it. I&#x27;ve built a flight search tool in selenium too, and for isolating deals. (I&#x27;ve also used selenium for testing). The biggest problem is the speed and the unexpected (the spinner you experienced, intermittent page load times, asynchronous requests or when elements are stale as a result). But it is possible to do it.<p>Next you can thread the sucker, so you could have 2-4 PS windows open and enter at a faster speed ;)

I use selenium similarly to drive a similarly awful interface known as costpoint. I would DEARLY love to know how to use the browser developer tools to figure out what is actually happening under the hood of websites without having to read every single Javascript module. The network tab shows you what is sent and received but it&#x27;s not easy to figure out how those messages are created and parsed. It would be nice to learn how to debug and step through some of that.<p>If I could learn the underlying api, I could write a tool that would never change. The ui changes much more frequently than the interface between client and server code. Besides, it would be much faster this way.

I&#x27;m always interested in clever use cases for Selenium.<p>It seems like &quot;automating boring stuff using Selenium&quot; should be a bigger category than it is - and use cases that can do it profitably are always fascinating.

Webdriver is for more than just testing! Very cool demonstration.<p>My biggest headache was in getting the right selectors for the various form fields - some services have shifting IDs and classes (ugh xpath)

IMHO it&#x27;s usually better to write a WebExtension instead of using Selenium, since you have more control over the browser, can intercept and modify network requests, can access the DOM from JavaScript while being protected from the page altering the environment, and can ship the code as a browser add-on, while still being able to communicate with native apps.<p>Only downside is that you can&#x27;t drive old IE and mobile browsers except for Firefox for Android.

Any tools to do this with native applications too not just browsers? We have been flooded by this RPA companies the past 2 years and I&#x27;d love a way to do this with Python. It is actually a potentially very profitable market since the impact of automation is very visible (people see cursors do stuff for them...).

I would love to hear any more you have to say about the genetic algorithms you use to help with scheduling.

Selenium leaves trace in HTTP requests, so its use is quite detectable. The authors of PeopleSoft can include Selenium detection in their products, disallowing your automation scripts. Why not use GreaseMonkey instead?

add AI on top of that which learns what&#x2F;where&#x2F;how to enter (or at least suggests) and you get the modern office automation wave.

Ha! I see your crappy UI in PeopleSoft, with hard to automate edge cases, and I raise you multiple SharePoint instances!<p>Ante up at your peril in this game :&#x2F;)