Logging into the intranet

Now that it has opened the browser, our robot needs to log into the intranet, using Maria's credentials.

The second step: logging in

Let's add the next logical step to our task. We'll call it Log In. The *** Tasks *** cell should look like this after adding the step:

*** Tasks ***
Insert the sales data for the week and export it as a PDF
    Open The Intranet Website
    Log In

Add a new *** Keywords *** cell before the *** Tasks *** cell and add this code to it:

*** Keywords ***
Log In

Ok! Now we have to tell our robot to find the correct fields on the page and fill them.

Note: Defining each keyword in a separate Notebook cell makes it possible to execute them individually. This is useful in more complex projects, where you might want to run and edit a single keyword instead of running the full robot all the time. You could add the new Log In keyword to the existing Open The Intranet Website keyword cell, too, but then you would lose the ability to execute the keywords individually.

Finding a form field

You, a human being (just assuming!), can see and find things such as forms and fields on a web page. Your robot, however, lacks both vision and the ability to think. It needs very specific instructions to find anything.

A web page is written in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). It defines the meaning and structure of web content. The RobotSpareBin intranet is also built using HTML.

To find forms, fields, and other elements from an HTML web page, your robot needs to know their locators. Think of a locator as the street address for an element, such as the username field on the RobotSpareBin intranet login page.

If you want, you can go deeper and learn more about how to find interface elements in web applications and the concept of locators in this dedicated article.

This is what the username field HTML markup looks like:

<input type="text" id="username" name="username" required="" class="form-control"/>

It is an input element. It has several attributes, such as type, id and name. We can use these to locate (find) the elements.

We need to tell the robot to fill in the login form. The RPA.Browser.Selenium library provides a Input Text keyword that can fill in text fields. The keyword takes two arguments: The locator argument tells where to input. The value argument tells what to input.

In our case, we can call the keyword like this to input maria in the field that has an attribute name with the value of username:

    Input Text    username    maria

Note that you need to have at least two spaces between the keyword and each of the arguments.

Filling and submitting the form

Modify the Log in *** Keywords *** cell, so that it looks like this:

*** Keywords ***
Log In
    Input Text    username    maria

Now run the robot, and it will fill the username field:

Great! Now we can do the same thing for the password: the only difference is that we should use the more specific Input Password keyword. This keyword accepts the same arguments, with the difference that it will not output the value of our secret password in the log.

Note: In a real project, you should take measures to never commit your credentials in your robot code. To learn more about how to secure your sensitive data in Control Room, you can read this article.

So our keyword now is:

*** Keywords ***
Log In
    Input Text    username    maria
    Input Password    password    thoushallnotpass

Note: Robocorp Lab also allows you to input selectors using the user interface. Here's how it would look like in our case:

As the last step, the robot needs to submit the form, which we can do by adding the Submit Form keyword:

*** Keywords ***
Log In
    Input Text    username    maria
    Input Password    password    thoushallnotpass
    Submit Form

Here's how the complete robot code looks like now:

*** Settings ***
Documentation     Robot to enter weekly sales data into the RobotSpareBin Industries Intranet.
Library           RPA.Browser.Selenium

*** Keywords ***
Open The Intranet Website
    Open Available Browser    https://robotsparebinindustries.com/

*** Keywords ***
Log In
    Input Text    username    maria
    Input Password    password    thoushallnotpass
    Submit Form

*** Tasks ***
Insert the sales data for the week and export it as a PDF
    Open The Intranet Website
    Log In

Run the robot one more time, and you should see it opening the browser, navigating to the intranet, and happily logging in, just like Maria does!

What we learned

• You can use the Input Text keyword from the RPA.Browser.Selenium library to fill text input fields.
• You can tell your robots which elements in a webpage to act on by writing locators.
• You should use the Input Password keyword to fill password fields.
• You should not commit credentials directly into your .robot files. We are doing it here because it's a beginner's course, but you should never do this in the real world.