Creating a PDF
To make sure that her colleagues actually look at the sales data, Maria usually creates a PDF out of the sales data table in the intranet and sends it out as a company newsletter.
After all, it would be a shame if no one saw the result of all that copy-pasting!
Maria's procedure involves copying the table into Microsoft Word and then exporting it to PDF from there with some additional software, our robot instead will do it all by itself automatically.
What we want is to turn the table on the left into the PDF on the right:
So, as always, let's start by adding a new step in our *** Tasks ***
cell:
*** Tasks ***
Insert the sales data for the week and export it as a PDF
Open The Intranet Website
Log In
Download The Excel File
Fill The Form Using The Data From The Excel File
Collect The Results
Export The Table As A PDF
Then we add a new *** Keywords ***
cell just before it:
*** Keywords ***
Export The Table As A PDF
As always, we plan to do this in steps. (Remember about the poor elephant we are eating? 🐘)
Our plan for this keyword is:
- we will isolate the part of the page that contains the sales table
- we will assign the content of that part of the page to a variable
- we will create a PDF with the HTML content of the table.
Getting the HTML table element out of the page
The first thing we want to do is to make sure that the table element is actually on the page when we try to "grab" it. We'll use the Wait Until Element Is Visible
keyword. We just need a locator.
This is how the HTML source of the table area on the page looks like:
...
<div id="sales-results">
<table class="table table-dark table-striped">
...
</table>
</div>
...
We can see that the table is wrapped in a <div>
element with an id
attribute of sales-results
. Our locator will then be id:sales-results
.
Look at that beautiful code. It's almost like that page was created for this course! 😍
So we will modify our keyword like this:
*** Keywords ***
Export The Table As A PDF
Wait Until Element Is Visible id:sales-results
Next, we want to put the actual HTML markup of that element into a variable. We can do this with the Get Element Attribute
keyword (RPA.Browser
library) like this:
*** Keywords ***
Export The Table As A PDF
Wait Until Element Is Visible id:sales-results
${sales_results_html}= Get Element Attribute id:sales-results outerHTML
Ok, we admit this was not too easy to guess. 😅 But no panic! Let's see what's going on in this new line. We are creating a variable (${sales_results_html}=
), and we are storing into it what we get out of the Get Element Attribute
keyword. We pass two arguments to that keyword: the first one is the locator for the element (id:sales-results
); the second is the name of the attribute of that element we want to get. In our case, we want all the HTML markup it contains, so we choose the outerHTML
attribute.
You can read more about the Element API if you are interested. It gets quite technical, though. Don't say we did not warn you! 🙂
Alright! Now let's run our robot again:
We can see in the log that the robot has now grabbed the HTML markup for the table:
Creating the PDF file out of the HTML contents variable
Only one more step to go!
Now that we have the HTML contents of the table in a variable, we need to create a PDF file out of it. To do it, we will add the RPA.PDF
library!
Add a new library, get new keywords... Wax on, wax off... 🥋 Practice will make us perfect! 💪
*** Settings ***
Documentation Robot to enter weekly sales data into the RobotSpareBin Industries Intranet.
Library RPA.Browser
Library RPA.Excel.Files
Library RPA.HTTP
Library RPA.PDF
Now we can add the final line to our keyword.
*** Keywords ***
Export The Table As A PDF
Wait Until Element Is Visible id:sales-results
${sales_results_html}= Get Element Attribute id:sales-results outerHTML
Html To Pdf ${sales_results_html} ${CURDIR}${/}output${/}sales_results.pdf
We use the Html To Pdf
keyword provided by the RPA.PDF
library to create a sales_results.pdf
file out of our ${sales_results_html}
variable's contents, and place it again into the output
folder (${CURDIR}${/}output
).
And that's it!
Here's what our robot code looks like now:
*** Settings ***
Documentation Robot to enter weekly sales data into the RobotSpareBin Industries Intranet.
Library RPA.Browser
Library RPA.Excel.Files
Library RPA.HTTP
Library RPA.PDF
*** Keywords ***
Open The Intranet Website
Open Available Browser https://robotsparebinindustries.com/
*** Keywords ***
Log In
Input Text id:username maria
Input Password id:password thoushallnotpass
Submit Form
Wait Until Page Contains Element id:sales-form
*** Keywords ***
Download The Excel file
Download https://robotsparebinindustries.com/SalesData.xlsx overwrite=True
*** Keywords ***
Fill And Submit The Form For One Person
[Arguments] ${sales_rep}
Input Text firstname ${sales_rep}[First Name]
Input Text lastname ${sales_rep}[Last Name]
Input Text salesresult ${sales_rep}[Sales]
${target_as_string}= Convert To String ${sales_rep}[Sales Target]
Select From List By Value salestarget ${target_as_string}
Click Button Submit
*** Keywords ***
Fill The Form Using The Data From The Excel File
Open Workbook SalesData.xlsx
${sales_reps}= Read Worksheet As Table header=True
Close Workbook
FOR ${sales_rep} IN @{sales_reps}
Fill And Submit The Form For One Person ${sales_rep}
END
*** Keywords ***
Collect The Results
Screenshot css:div.sales-summary ${CURDIR}${/}output${/}sales_summary.png
*** Keywords ***
Export The Table As A PDF
Wait Until Element Is Visible id:sales-results
${sales_results_html}= Get Element Attribute id:sales-results outerHTML
Html To Pdf ${sales_results_html} ${CURDIR}${/}output${/}sales_results.pdf
*** Tasks ***
Insert the sales data for the week and export it as a PDF
Open The Intranet Website
Log In
Download The Excel File
Fill The Form Using The Data From The Excel File
Collect The Results
Export The Table As A PDF
Let's run the robot one final time:
We can see a new sales_results.pdf
file appear in the output
directory, containing the sales data! 🎉🎉🎉
What we learned
- You can use the
Get Element Attribute
keyword from theRPA.Browser
library to get the actual HTML markup of any element using theouterHTML
attribute. - The names of the libraries are case-sensitive.
- You can create a PDF file easily starting from HTML content using the
RPA.PDF
library and theHtml To Pdf
keyword.