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I need to use a website that has a lot of selection / form filling drudgery What's a good way to automate this in a browser? Autofill extension do help but it cannot seem to handle drop down lists and check boxes so well. Also all the form isn't laid out on a single page and auto fill does not seem to be good at encoding that sort of workflow.

There's some text fields, some drop downs, some check boxes etc. It would be a plus if the tool can click submit and wait for the next page to load and then do keystrokes on that one too.

What are good options to macro-ize this sort of repetitive browser selection work? Any plugins? Stand alone software?

I usually use Chrome on Windows but I can change browsers if that is a sticking point.

Edit: A GUI based solution would be more welcome.

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With a little work you can do exactly this with the python2 mechanize library - it will act as the browser and can automate filling in even the most complex of forms. There is quite a good cheat sheet here.

  • Free
  • Can pretend to be most web browsers

Note that at the moment the mechanize module has not yet been fully ported to python3 so you will need to use/install python 2.7.8 or later.

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  • That solution sounds great but here I was hoping for something more by the way of a GUI. My bad. I should have clarified that in my original post. I have edited the question now to clarify this.
    – curious_cat
    May 18, 2015 at 5:50
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For a GUI based solution there is always sikuli

  • Python based testing automation framework
  • Uses optical recognition to locate items to interact with
  • Can move on through web pages
  • Free

Example

Taken from the sikuli web site:

SikuliX allows to automate visual workflows Something like that we do every day sitting in front of our PC:

  • we want to achieve something
  • we use an application for that (e.g. the browser to access web content)
  • we click some buttons, links or other visuals
  • we wait that the app reacts and shows the expected result on the screen
  • we fill in some text somewhere and press some functional keys like TAB or ENTER
  • again we wait for some expected reaction or result
  • we click ...
  • we wait ...
  • we type ...
  • we wait ...
  • we ...
  • ...
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  • That sounds very good. I will try it out. Thank you!
    – curious_cat
    May 18, 2015 at 6:09

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