Dynamic Selector (variable in selector) in Desktop Automation

[HellitonWoo]

Hi fellow users,

Has anyone found a solution to use "variable" in the selector?

For instance, the application may have a table, to click and type into the table, I need the index of the row and column.

Thus it would be nice to create a variable to help to point to the row that I'm about the click.

I've tried referring the variable using %var%, but it won't work.

BR

Helliton

[adijain · Accepted solution]

Hello @HellitonWoo,

Variables can be parsed in CSS and UI selectors in Power Automate Desktop. To do that please follow the steps below:

• Search for the element that needs to be edited in the UI elements pane, right click on the element and go to edit selectors.
• Navigate to the selector builder which can be used to easily customize the selector and click on "custom" toggle button.
  • 
• Now for your case you would need to parse the variable %var_row% in the table selector attribute. e.g. shown in the screenshot below:
  • 

Hope the above helps. Please let us know the target selector path and variable name to be parsed if you encounter any issues. Thanks!  

[HellitonWoo]

@adijain 

Thanks for the answer!

This is the selector, and the way it worked exactly as explained:

window[Class="#32770"][Name="New Invoice"] > list[Class="SysListView32"] > listitem[Id="ListViewItem-%row_nr%"] > text[Id="ListViewSubItem-%col_nr%"]

[Anonymous]

Hi

I struggled a bit with using a dynamic selector as well untill I understood that in order for it to work, "Custom" HAS to be toggled 🙂 

Best Regards

Mikkel

[Kevin77]

Hi Guyz,

Please help to solve this dynamic selector div[Id="screenarea2.B10"].

[adijain]

Hi @Kevin77, you can customize the selector to this: 

iframe[Id="application-Shell-startGUI"] > div[Id^="screenarea2"]

this can be done either by hitting the custom button or changing the div's Id attribute operator to "Starts with"

[RiiG]

Hi

can variables be used in attribute names?

this didn't work.....

[RiiG]

is there any way to remove the quotes from around the variable in the selector above? 

[Niraj466]

I'm also facing the same issue. Variable used as Value for Attribute, it looks it doesn't work. 

[RiiG]

sorry i cant help with your specific question!

but I managed to do what I wanted (message 7) without using the Visual editor

good luck

[Niraj466]

Anyone can have idea, why the attribute name "Ordinal" is not displaying in "Preview selector". Is this a bug here or I'm missing anything?

[Maheshwar]

Enable the Text editor flag and run. It will work

[nomintsetseg]

Thank you, this solution worked in my case.

[JnY5]

The interface was updated and you must not toggle the "Text Editor" option to on in order for the variable to be used in the element selector.

We can also test selectors now- which is wonderful!

I have some dynamic selectors set up that test successfully in the Selector editor but fail in the flow run.

Anyone had that experience?

[marcmrx]

Hello,

I'm building my 1st Power Automate task (after many UiPath).
I struggle with dynamic selectors.

I created var called day with value 09 (I also tried with day=row2024-02-09 and adapted the selector acordingly)

I created a dynamic selector with %day% inside
When I test it on the UI selector interface, it works

When I run it in the flow it does not work 😕

I'm also trying ${day}, $day, {day}, but none are working so far

Any clue how to debug that ?
Thanks 🙂

[ALester]

When running the flow are you setting the variable as shown in the screen capture, or are you using the output of the 'Get current date and time' action?   If you are using the action you would likely need to 'Convert datetime to text' for this to work.

[marcmrx · Accepted solution]

I ended up by creating a new project without Fx and it went smoothly from then on. Thx 🙂

[ALester]

It looks like I was only a month late to the party.  Glad you figured out an alternative.