[Robotics] Common control in all pages?
Hi,
The website I am working with has a logout button and the same menu items in all pages. Is there a way to define a control as one the occurs in all pages?
Currently, I have a log out control in all pages, with the same match rules, and in my logout automation, I have a massive waitany for all these logout buttons.
Is there a better way to handle this? Some way to have a single logout control for all pages?
Pegasystems Inc.
US
@KhaledA7 There isn't a way to define a control outside of the page itself. In this case, you would need the logout control on each page if you wanted to always be able to click it from anywhere. A long WaitAny with the timeout set to 1 (millisecond) is how I would handle this. You could also use a series of IsCreated properties, but I find a WaitAny with a 1 millisecond timeout looks better. If your application is a single page application (meaning that the pages do not reload when you navigate), then you might be able to define a container for your logout button that exists on every "page" of the application. In this case your 'pages" would be a container beneath the page itself. If it is a normal web page though, where you see the page reload with each navigation, then each page is truly separate.
Boubyan Bank K.S.C.
KW
A WaitAny is also what I was recommended by my colleagues. However, the process of interrogating about the same dozen controls on each page, in a dozen so pages, is cumbersome.
A few ways my colleagues got around it in older projects was to interrogate only the next page they need to navigate to in any one specific page, the logout on all pages, and the home button on all pages in case navigating to the next page in a specific pages fails.
Another way was to set the match rules for a single "page" to be the shared part of the URL that all the pages share, and differentiate between the different pages by interrogating the div or frm that contains all the differences between the pages and set those divs match rule to Control Children match rule only to differentiate. This makes for a single logout, home, and different navigation tabs buttons shared between all pages without having to interrogate them more than once.
Pegasystems Inc.
US
Yes, your suggestion of a generic page can be useful, however it does require some thought. I will document that below, however your suggestion of using a DIV to separate the remainder of your pages from the section containing the common controls could work similar to if it were a single-page application as I described above.
It is possible to interrogate a page generically so that it matches any page on a given site. For example, if I wanted a page that matched everything on Pega's website, I might interrogate a page and use the URL Match rule and set it such that it contains "pega.com". Any page I navigate to on the website would now match this page. If I were to need to interrogate all of my specific pages first and then interrogate this generic page last, the order of matching would ensure that the generic page only matches whenever none of the others do. Matching order is determined by the order that you interrogate controls in. This means that if you were to interrogate the generic page first, it would always match first. None of your other pages would ever match since matching stops once a suitable match is found. This means that you must be careful when using this technique as you would need to delete this generic page and re-interrogate it if you were ever to need to interrogate another page.
Boubyan Bank K.S.C.
KW
Ah, that is a good idea.
Could Pega add a feature to reorder the matching order? Perhaps a drag and drop from the Object Explorer? Or perhaps a "Matching Order" tab on the web adapter next to "Web Controls" tab?
That would be very helpful.