Using Visual Basic together with Internet Explorer

[Sony170]

There is an online form which we need to fill out for each of our inventory units. This form has several dozen fields though. We have to fill each one out for every unit that we ship (which is about a hundred a day).

But the good news is, about 25 of these 30 fields are always filled in with the same value (our name, address, city, state, zip, insurance, insurance no, carrier, carrier no, etc).

What we want is a way to fill out these fields for us automatically, and all we have to do is type in the remaining 5 fields ourselves.

My temporary solution was to create a form with 5 fields and a Submit button. Then using AppActivate "Inventory Adjustment - Microsoft Internet Explorer", we would use the SendKeys function and virtually "type" in the 5 variable values and the 25 other "hardcoded" values, using the Tab key to move in between fields.

However, we have encountered some issues using SendKeys. For one, the cursor doesn't always start in the correct place, and the fields become horribly offset and skewed. Also we notice that sometimes the cursor moves "too fast" apparently and skips pasting some of the values (an issue we tried to resolve by using "wait" commands, but it didn't help consistently enough).

Is there a better way to use Visual Basic to fill in fields in an Internet Explorer window?

 

[Sony170]

we've been testing out the sendkey method for a week now, and it still isn't consistent enough of a solution; sometimes the fields would be offset and the wrong keys are sent to the wrong field, or in the most odd cases, you see the cursor jump from field to field, but nothing gets filled out.

 

[TheEvilBankers]

You might want to post this to the VB forums. Things quickly get buried in the general forum.

K