USER MANUALS

NSEQL Commands: General Overview

NSEQL includes commands for reproducing in an automatic fashion the main actions that can be performed manually with an Internet browser. More specifically:

  • The command navigate facilitates navigation to a URL (as if a user had typed the URL in the browser address bar).

  • goBack, goForward, refresh and stop allow actions to be executed as if the back, forward, refresh (also called reload) and stop buttons of the browser had been clicked.

  • The command family clickOnAnchorByXXX and clickOnAreaByXXX is used to locate a link or an HTML map in the current browser page and execute a click on it.

  • The selectAnchorByXXX group of commands allows for a link to be selected within the current browser page. Further actions can be carried out on it and/or its contents once the link is selected with this command.

  • The command family findFormByXXX locates and selects a form to apply actions to its elements through subsequent commands.

  • The command families setInputValue, setTextAreaValue and selectIndexByXXX assign values to fields of the selected form.

  • The commands submitForm, clickOnElement, clickOnInputElement, fireEvent execute actions on elements in the last form selected.

  • The command family findFrameByXXX selects a frame of the current browser page by its name, source or position so that actions invoked thereafter refer to this frame. With resetFrame the active frame becomes the home page again.

  • The command family findElementByXXX locates and selects an element in the current frame. Different location criteria can be used: element type, attribute values, content text, position,and xpath expressions.

  • The command family findChildElementByXXX lets users locate and select elements that are children of the currently selected element. It is possible to use different criteria to locate them: element type, value of a specific attribute, contained text, position …

  • The command family selectOptionByXXX lets users choose one option in a previously selected <select> element.

  • The command setChecked lets users check or uncheck a previously selected <input type=”checkbox”> element.

  • clickOnSelectedElement, fireEventOnSelectedElement and transposeSelectedTable execute actions on the last element selected.

  • A navigation sequence can involve several browser windows. The NSEQL commands for manipulating said windows are allowOpenNewWindow, selectWindow and closeWindow. New windows can also be created through openNewWindow and set or access the window name through setWindowName and getWindowName.

  • The command waitPages makes the browser wait until a specific number of pages are downloaded before executing the remainder of the NSEQL program commands. The command extendedWaitPages performs this same operation, but allowing the system to guess the number of pages required to continue the navigation. The wait command allows to wait a fixed amount of time, specified as an input parameter.

  • The command postData directly issues POST-type http requests.

  • The command setAmbientProperties configures the elements of the pages that should be downloaded and executed by the browser (e.g. images, Java applets, ActiveX controls, etc.). Another command for configuring browser behavior is setProxyAuthInfo.

  • The commands getSourceCode, queryDownloadedPages, getTitle, getLocation and others obtain certain data from the current page, the current form or the last navigation. These data can be useful for debugging the NSEQL programs (see the ITPilot Generation Environment Guide for a description of the generation environments of NSEQL programs that are available in ITPilot).

  • The commands onDialog, onPrintDialog, onWebPageDialog and OnCertificateDialogDenodoBrowser allow managing pop-up browser windows, performing tasks such as placing content in dialog text fields, pressing specific buttons, moving cursors, and so on.

  • The commands convertWordToHtml, convertExcelToHtml and convertPDFToHtml turn a Microsoft Word/Microsoft Excel/Adobe PDF resource into an HTML resource to allow for the subsequent extraction of information using ITPilot.

  • The command saveFile downloads a resource and saves it to the local filesystem.

  • The executeJS and ExecuteJSBeforeLoad commands allow the execution of JavaScript code on a browser-loaded page.

  • The cancelNextNavigation command lets the user cancel the navigation triggered by an event, to allow processing the page as it is before the action (e.g. with the real URLs which are going to be accessed after the JavaScript code execution).

  • The commands openWebPageDialogsInNewWindow, OpenAlertDialogsInNewWindow and OpenNewWindowsUnnamed let users enable and disable different JavaScript functions in order to simplify certain browsing and data extraction actions.

  • The commands clearPersistentCookies and clearCache allow the user to clear the browsing data.

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