Component Configuration¶

The sequence component can now be configured. To do so, once again select the component so that its input configuration area is shown. In this area you can specify the inputs for the component:

• Input Values: input values to be used in Web browsing. In this case, it is necessary to select the record created by the init component in section Process Initialization, by clicking on the icon of the “Input Values” element and selecting the register “MAILPARAMS”.

• Input Page: Optionally, the Sequence component can also receive a page type variable as input. This page must come from another component with a Web page as its output value, such as another Sequence component or a Next Interval Iterator component. When this parameter is provided, the input page will be loaded into the browser before starting the sequence execution. This is not necessary in this example.

Double-click on the Sequence component to access the Sequence Editor wizard. This is where the navigation sequence must be loaded. A navigation sequence is a set of NSEQL commands that describes different events on a Web browser. The navigation sequence can be created in two different ways:

• Using the navigation sequence generation tool included in ITPilot. This tool (described in detail in section Generating Navigation Sequences of this manual), integrated as a tool bar in the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser, allows automatically generating the NSEQL program by recording user operations in the browser. This is the recommended way to generate navigation sequences.

• Typing the NSEQL sequence manually. NSEQL is a relatively simple language to use and advanced users may prefer this option. In this case, the Sequence Editor helps the advanced user in the process through syntax highlight and auto-complete features.

In this example, the sequence generation tool is used. Open a Microsoft Internet Explorer browser from the Denodo generation tool (either directly via the Browser >New Browser option in the main menu or by pressing the combination of keys Ctrl-B). A Microsoft Internet Explorer browser window will appear with the navigation sequence recording toolbar (see Denodo Toolbar). Notice that the Internet Explorer instances launched from the Wrapper Generation Tool can be easily identified because the Internet Explorer icon appears in a red color instead of the usual blue. If the toolbar does not appear, check that the menu option “View -> Tool Bars -> Sequence Generator” is marked.

Although this section does not intend to give full details as to how this toolbar works, we will explain the steps required for our example. For further information, read the section Generating Navigation Sequences, which explains the way in which the sequence generation tool works, and the manual ITPilot NSEQL Guide.

Start recording by clicking on the button and entering the navigation sequence initial URL (Initial URL). In our example, it is the login page of the Web mail system:

Initial URL¶

The “Converter” selection list indicates whether the resource to be accessed via the URL is a Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel or PDF document (it is left blank by default, which means that an HTML resource is expected). ITPilot is capable of processing Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and PDF documents through automatic HTML conversion.

After clicking on OK, the browser will display the home page (Home Page):

Home Page¶

Now, we place the cursor on the Username field, then right-click and select the “SetText” option; a dialog box (see Text Selection Dialog) will appear, allowing us to write the text we would like to add to the field (using the “Set Custom Text” option). In this case, we will type the username ‘demos’. We can also use the “Variable name” field in the dialog to specify that at execution time, an input parameter of the sequence should be used instead of the typed example value. In our case, we should type ‘LOGIN’ as variable name since that was the name we assigned to the parameter in the Initialization component (recall section Process Initialization). Clicking ok, the username field is filled in with ‘demos’.

Now, repeat the process with the password field. The password is ‘DeMo.04’ and the variable name should be ‘PASSWORD’. The result can be seen in the Result of the Text Selection operation.

Text Selection Dialog¶

Result of the Text Selection operation¶

To proceed with navigation, we need to click “Log in”. This is done by positioning the cursor over the button, right-clicking, and selecting the “Click” action. The browser will go to the results page.

Navigation status can be checked at any time by clicking on “ToolBar State Info”. This will show the series of NSEQL commands that the generation tool has created to date.

After checking that the semaphore icon is green, signaling that the recording of the last navigation step has finished, you can stop the recording process by clicking on the button.

The sequence can be imported directly in the Sequence component by clicking on the “Import from Browser” button in its wizard. Sequence editor with loaded sequence shows the result of the action.

You can also save the sequence if it is going to be used in other processes. This is achieved by clicking on the button of the toolbar. You can use it later in other ‘Sequence’ components by using the “Load from File” button in the Sequence wizard.

Once loaded, the sequence can be modified where necessary, which also implies that the navigation sequence can also be handwritten, although in this case we recommend that you first read the ITPilot NSEQL Guide.

Sequence editor with loaded sequence¶

Once we have imported the sequence, we can test it by clicking on the Test button. The dialog shown in Edit variable values dialog will appear to request values for LOGIN and PASSWORD. The “Hidden” check boxes will allow hiding/showing a variable value during the test execution.

Edit variable values dialog¶

Regarding our example, we are finished with the Sequence component, but the component wizard includes many other options. Therefore, at this point you can either click ‘ok’ and skip to section Error Processing on the Web Browsing Automation to continue with the example, or keep reading to know more about advanced configuration options of the ‘Sequence ‘ component.

Sequence editor with loaded sequence also shows some configuration parameters in the Sequence editor. More specifically:

• Sequence Type: ITPilot provides access to Web resources via different communication protocols described below:

  • browser pool: This is the default option. In this case, the sequence will be run using a browser contained in the browser pool. The browser pool is configured in the Wrapper Server in which the wrapper is run. The browser pool uses browsers to run NSEQL sequences, using Microsoft Internet Explorer or the Denodo browser. The default setting will select the browser specified in the overall preferences page of the generation tool, as described in the section Generation Tool Global Preferences. In section Comparison Between MSIE and Denodo Browser, we compare the different browser options.

  • Denodo Browser: This option uses the Denodo browser. The difference with respect to selecting the ‘browser pool’ option and the ‘Denodo Browser’ browser type is that in this case the browser pool server will not be needed to execute the wrapper; instead the browser will be created in runtime by the Wrapper Server.

  • FTP: This provides access to the resource via ftp, ftps or sftp protocols. The format in which the access path to the resource must be entered in the write area is as follows: protocol://login:password@domain:port, where:

    • protocol: ftp, ftps or sftp

    • login: user name

    • password: password to access the server

    • domain: specific address of the server

    • port: port where the server is run (by default this is port 21 for ftp, port 22 for sftp and port 990 for ftps)

  • local: Likewise, ITPilot provides access to resources in the local file system. The format to use is: file://address 1, where:

    • address: access path and resource name

• Reuse Connection: When a page value is provided as input parameter to the component, this option indicates whether the browser used to obtain the input page is reused to execute the sequence or whether a new browser is launched, and the input page loaded in that browser. This option is usually selected because in the majority of cases makes sense to reuse the same browser, although in some cases (such as when the Iterator component is used, as explained in section Processing the Retrieved Results) it may not be useful. In our example this option is disabled because the component has no Page-type input parameter.

• Maximum retries: as indicated in the section Comparison Between MSIE and Denodo Browser, where the processing of errors of some type for this component is configured to “retry and fail if error persists” or “retry and ignore if error persists”, this parameter determines the number of retries to be made.

• Time between retries: this indicates the time between one retry and the next in the event of the first failing. The time is defined in milliseconds.

Footnotes

1

Please note that the path can start with a “/” symbol. For example, Windows paths start by “/”, so in order to access a specific directory, enter file:///c:/directory.