Has anyone tried to use the excel send key vba macro to book trades on a webbased order entry window? Is it even feasible? Any help is highly appreciated.
Send Keys doesn’t work very well on web-based stuff because send keys will either send key strokes to an application main window or to some control that you to which you have given it a window handle. Alas, html text boxes don’t have windows handles so you have to try something else. Also, (having hacked at everything in my life) after you use send keys for any significant amount of time you will decide that it is unreliable and crappy way of doing things. I’ll sell you a dll for a windows robot that will fill in stuff much more reliably. Now if you are automating web-based apps, you have two choices (that I know of, but I am not the world’s leading expert at this) plug-ins and opening explorer from the ActiveX that Microsoft gives away. Maybe some other browsers have similar controls. In either case, you can write good code that says stuff like “OK, is the window up now the one I want to use for trade entry?” “Is it ready for input?” “Do we have a text box named ‘Quantity’” “Is it empty?” “If yes, to all above enter text [blah] into the box and pop an event when the box is full”. You can scream through web forms with this kind of code Edit: Gruesome misspelling…
Thank you very much for pointing me to the right direction. I’ve tried out the procedure below and it works fine for the site below but doesn’t work with the webmax site where I have to enter the trades. How do I figure out the elements(text boxes) of a html source protected site? I need to figure out at least the main url to make the code below work but how do I do that if the site source code is not visible? Public Sub IE_Form_Fill() Dim URL As String Dim IE As Object Dim HTMLdoc As Object URL = “http://www.regnow.com/signup/vendor” Set IE = CreateObject(“InternetExplorer.Application”) With IE .Visible = True .Navigate URL While .Busy Or .ReadyState <> 4: DoEvents: Wend Set HTMLdoc = .Document End With With HTMLdoc.forms(0) .elements(“companyname”).Value = Range(“A1”).Value .elements(“address1”).Value = Range(“B1”).Value .elements(“state”).Value = “MA” .elements(“contract”).Checked = True 'Submit the form .submit End With 'Wait for new page to load While IE.Busy Or IE.ReadyState <> 4: DoEvents: Wend End Sub