I sometimes apologize to the tools I use when I work because I use them badly, or in a way they only can return an error.

Well, today I felt like the witch from the sleeping hollow movie.

I was working on a code that logins to a page and download files to a folder, according to the user.

Well, I tried to use the webservices from the page (like it should be) but the links were broken, and I lost a entire working day on trying the API 😮

The second day I tried with Selenium. Everything was going ok, but I wanted to run it without opening the browser and I found a “Headless Chrome”. At the end of the day, I found several blogs saying that Headless Chrome can’t download files 😱 second working day lost

Today I read about “PhantomJS”. I tried the code in C# with OpenQA.Selenium.PhantomJS BUUUUUUT it was missing 😡 I also tried with Python, but I had the same problem.

Finally, I found a blog with a solution for C# with Headless Chrome 😄

I’m not a web programmer; I’m an application and SQL developer. So when I’m tasked with scrapping a web site for an ETL feed, I thought it would just be a ton of substring and Post/Get calls.

Nope! There is this garbage called JBOSS.A4J where the page isn’t a page but a bunch of files that are merged together and then it isn’t “real” but like a bunch of Photoshop layers that “look” like a page. JavaScript functions based on key press and things like Select/Option that looks like an element but Selenium/PhantomJS (C#) can’t find it. Or my Google-Fu isn’t working.

"Upgraded" to nginx over the weekend. Setup SSL to be secure and felt good about myself. Woke up to find PhantomJS can no longer access the site to generate PDFs. Had to remove the ciphers block until I figure out what it's compatible with. FML.

use 'Drillan767/last/rants';

PhantomJS is love
PhantomJS is life
I don't care if it's slow
Would you be my wife

Ok, long shot here. I'm doing a POC using a headless browser (Seleium/PhantomJS (C#)) and it is kicking my tail. Sometimes things work and then they don't. My login code is something like:

private IWebDriver _driver = new PhantomJSDriver();
_driver.Navigate().GoToUrl(LoginURL);
_driver.FindElement(By.Name("txtUser")).SendKeys(UserName);
_driver.FindElement(By.Name("txtPass")).SendKeys(Password);
_driver.FindElement(By.TagName("button")).Click();

and it doesn't find it even though it in in _driver.PageSource.

All the SO stuff is from 2013 and I’ve tried many, many, four days worth of many By.XPath, By.Id, By.Name combinations and it just doesn’t work.