Recommended tool for small, one-shot web automation script?

[littlebigman]

Hello,

Before retiring an old blog, I need to copy its articles as topics into a phpBB forum. Fiddling with SQL turned out to be a bit too involved without knowing how phpBB works under the hood.

Creating a new topic is pretty simple:

1. Click on "New Topic"
2. Fill Subject + Body
3. Click on "Submit"

All the articles will live in the same forum in the board.

It looks like AutoIT currently offers two supported tools for web automation: IUIAutomation ("can be used for multiple applications, and is based on the Microsoft automation API") and WebDriver ("the WebDriver interface for automation, it is the web standard for automation").

Before I dive in, which tool would you recommend for that job?

Thank you.

[SOLVE-SMART]

Hi @littlebigman,

out of your described scenario, I personally would go with WebDriver (au3WebDriver). As I understood, you want to find articles (you want to have the texts) of a blog website, you want to go to an forum website and create for each of the articles a new topic/thread (with the texts). Am I right? Depending on the structure of your blog articles (order in the DOM), WebDriver should manage this easily.

How about your experience with WebDriver? And with AutoIt? I ask because in case you're more familiar with JavaScript or Python for example, you could use Selenium instead. But of course, AutoIt and the au3WebDriver is well documented and works great 😀 .

By the way: A WebDriver Tutorial (as addition to the already given documentation) that I create is currently in progress and will be (hopefully) released at the end of the month (or at least in February). I told you this in case you are not in rush and can wait (or you "dive in" and do it 👍 ).

Best regards
Sven

[littlebigman]

Thanks for the infos.

I actually now have the blog articles in an SQLite database, so it'll be straight from there to phpBB.

I've fiddled a bit with AutoIT in the past, but am more familiar with Python. So I'll check both solutions.

[SOLVE-SMART]

Okay, this means you will load the data from SQLite into an array (I guess) and you will then go forward to the forum website and create the new entries (topics), alright. You can do it with AutoIt (the SQLite handling), also with Python. You can use AutoIt and au3WebDriver or Python and Selenium. Doesn't matter at the end, like you said it's only a "one timer".

Both ways would do the job, but since you are here @littlebigman in a AutoIt community, I have to suggest: use AutoIt for all of this 😅 .

Best regards
Sven