In this XPath Tutorial Video, I explain and demonstrate the creation of XPath Expressions from the perspective of an RPA Developer. I start off by showing some of the basics that I think you need to know in order to create basic XPath Expressions for the purpose of web automation in Robotic Process Automation tools, then I briefly show using those XPath Expressions in Blue Prism, Robomotion, Automation Anywhere, Robocorp, and OpenBots. I do also show Power Automate Desktop and UiPath (since these don’t support XPath for web automation) to show that they can accomplish the same thing as XPaths through the use of CSS Selectors and also their own custom selector syntax for anything CSS Selectors can’t handle. I then review a number of axes and functions in XPath that help to make more advanced XPath Expressions for use in complex scenarios of web automation.
Helpful links for learning XPath 1.0:
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Chrome
Windows 10 Pro
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00:00 Intro
01:30 Brief Intro to XPath and Chrome Dev Tools
05:24 Basic XPath Concepts and Examples using Google
26:48 Basic XPath Examples using DuckDuckGo
34:16 Intro to RPA tool demos
35:27 Quick Demo - Blue Prism
36:34 Quick Demo - Robomotion
37:25 Quick Demo - Automation Anywhere
38:37 Quick Demo - Robocorp
39:24 Quick Demo - OpenBots
40:29 Quick Demo - Power Automate Desktop and UiPath (Not using XPath)
44:32 Intro to Advanced Concepts
45:08 Axis/Axes using RPAChallenge (following-sibling and parent)
56:15 XPath Expressions and Case Sensitivity
1:01:08 Dealing with multiple instances of text() in the same element
1:05:50 Union Operator (Pipe Character)
1:10:43 Intro to Functions
1:11:09 Function - starts-with()
1:13:50 Function - string-length()
1:16:58 Function - not()
1:18:31 Function - last()
1:19:50 Function - normalize-space()
1:23:10 Conclusion