Use Selenium to automatically download reports from website

Python Help
1

I am hoping I can use Python to automate a very manual/time consuming process. Every week my team has download/export reports from a website that tracks certain data on our customers. We have to pull 3-4 reports for each customer and we have around 50 customers. This takes approx. 3-4 hours each week to accomplish.

I have no experience with Python or coding, but I did some research on something called Selenium that can automate certain tasks in browsers. Theoretically, is it possible to create a code in Python/Selenium that will automatically download the necessary reports for each of our customers? If this is not possible or feasible, is there another solution to automate this task?

Any insight or advice would be greatly appreciated.

2

In principle yes. But the devil will be in the details.
Some websites make it easy to login and download stuff.
Others make it very hard to do.

Apart from python skills you will need to know HTML and JavaScript to figure what you need get selenium to do.

3

Actually, before reaching for Selenium, I would recommend seeing if you can directly fetch the reports from the web site. It’s hard to get into specifics based on the info you’ve given, but broadly speaking, anything your browser can do, Python can do quietly. Check out the “requests” package, and perhaps explore the reports web site using Chrome Dev Tools or Mozilla Firebird or equivalent - you can watch what the site is doing.

4

Does the website have an API that allows you to get the reports easterly?
Have you ask the operator how to they recommend you can get the reports in bulk?