Gaining HTML information from a website can be difficult. Gaining information using visual tasks is alluring, and can be the correct method of collecting the information needed in some cases. However, visual tasks can be slow and hard to make accurate.
In the following examples, I will simply take the visual process and turn it into advanced commands and see how it affects the speed of the programs.
Given this website (Trulia), I extracted the price and the address for the property then structured them to be sent in an email. I then emailed the messages to myself and recorded them.
In Kryon Studio, I set up a timer by saving the time when the robot gets started. I then recorded the site and used visual methods to extract the information from the webpage. I then created an email in Outlook and sent it. After sending the email I then compare the time saved in the beginning with the current time and that provides me with the total time taken to perform the aforementioned tasks.
Here are the results:
Wizard Name: Web2OutlookTestForVerint_All_Visual
Total time took: 43 Seconds
Screenshot of result email:
After seeing the results, I started simply replacing the visual tasks with advanced commands (keyboard shortcuts). These shortcuts were both in the webpage and in Outlook, but the major improvement was in the keyboard shortcuts in Outlook.
Here are the results:
Wizard Name: Web2OutlookTestForVerint_Visual
Total time took: 10 Seconds
Screenshot of result email:
This difference was the largest. The simple change of using keyboard shortcuts where I could cut 33 seconds off of the task. I now replaced the visual tasks in the webpage with HTML commands.
Here are the results:
Wizard Name: Web2OutlookTestForVerint_HTML
Total time took: 9 Seconds
Screenshot of result email:
I then replaced the HTML commands with JavaScript code.
Here are the results:
Wizard Name: Web2OutlookTestForVerint_HTML
Total time took: 8 Seconds
Screenshot of result email:
These two changes made minimal differences to the total time taken. I then changed from using Outlook to send the email to the built in email client.
Here are the results:
Wizard Name: Web2OutlookTestForVerint_JavaScript_NoOutlook
Total time took: 2 Seconds
Screenshot of result email:
Once finished I was able to draw these conclusions:
1. Advanced commands truly make a large difference in time and can help with accuracy and even formatting. The end wizard does the same task as the initial one, just 41 seconds faster!!
2. The visual task of gaining the text from the page could have been optimized and didn't really cost that much more time. If we simply look at the steps where we changed visual tasks to HTML or JavaScript tasks, it only decreased the usage by around 3 seconds. This proves that Advanced commands are faster, but it illustrates that the visual method of doing tasks in Kryon is pretty optimized and can be used in many situations.
3. Simply using the tools that Kryon provides (such as the built-in email client) helps tremendously.
4. The use of Keyboard Shortcuts can decrease the total time tremendously. The fact that 33 seconds of the original 43 was used by visual tasks in Outlook was astounding.