Today I wanted to automate checking the status of running jobs. There's a UI but navigating it is tedious and I sort of wanted a Dashboard.

So I started writing a Selenium app to automate it. I'm writing the code, inspecting all the inputs. And I'm looking "woah, all of them have nice ids... This should be easy"

Login is ok, but then run into IFrames (can't find the input elements on the page itself).

Fine Google... find the answer and so try again. But wait... It doesn't work???

There's apparently 9 of them on the page. And there's no easy way to identify the correct one...

Spent an hr trying different ways of locating the right one... eventually settling on very complex XPath...

All in all though it took 2 hours... And still not done...