How To get a web report

[JitenderChawla]

Hi,

I plan to pull a report from a web site. To get the report I need to make some selections For instance enter a value in text box (different values for different report), Select the report I want to pull using a drop down and then finally hit a button (play icon)

top pull the report. This futher gives an option below the page to open or save the report.. I want to save and use the report in my workflow. Would appreciate if you could advise how can I go about creating this workflow?

[BrandonB]

Ideally the website would have an API that you could use to pull from so that you could specify these different parameters. Could you provide some more information about this website that you need to pull the data from?

Taking a web scraping approach can also work, but I would advise against this if possible because websites and drop downs can change which would stop your workflow from working correctly: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Python-Code-Tool-Web-Scraping-Dynamic-...

[JitenderChawla]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. I already went through the link you provided however I am not too comfortable with Python also I would not have the Admin rights for the python libraries. Is there another way to achieve this.

Also, the website is internal and you would not be able to access it. Just to give you an idea.. I just need to enter the account num in the text box and using the drop down I need to select the report I want and hit a play icon to generate the report.

[BrandonB · Accepted solution]

@JitenderChawla Alteryx can pull data from APIs, SFTP sites, and web scrape as out of the box functionality. The process that you would like to accomplish is something that can be done via the Python tool in Alteryx, but there isn't a tool that otherwise interacts with a website to enter values and click on run buttons. Given that this is one of your company's internal resources, I wouldn't recommend taking this approach anyway due to the possibility of a website changing format and breaking the process.

If the website is internal to your company, there is most likely a database that lives behind it. I would reach out to the IT team that manages the site and see if there is a database that data can be pulled from. It is likely Microsoft SQL Server or an Oracle database which both can be queried directly from a workflow in a much safer way. That way you can reliably pull your data programatically and avoid the need to export data from a UI.

[JitenderChawla]

Thanks Brandon, brilliant suggestion. I will check with the technology team if I can get access to the database to pull the report using a query.