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Login

Level: Intermediate
How to automate login to a web site.

Login automation - Internet Explorer & Web Browser Control

Sometimes, we need to login to gain access to complete site. I will show you a way to log to www.hotmail.com, which requires user id, password and to push a button.
Before go further showing code, we need to know how login process takes place.
Sites needs to know where you enter things and we need too. Generally, textboxes used to enter id and password have names to diferentiate among others textboxes and it is marvelous. We need those names too.

Those names are located inside HTML code. We have to "read" HTML code the first time we access login page.

To this time, i already did that. The textbox name for user id is: login and textbox name for password is: passwd. The name of the button we need to press is: enter.

By now, you already know how to set object variables for InternetExplorer and you have been using WebBrowser control, so, i will not explain here again.

Private Sub Form_Load()
set IE = New InternetExplorer
With IE
     .navigate "www.hotmail.com"
     .visible = True
End With
End Sub

Let's go to DocumentComplete event:

Private Sub IE_DocumentComplete(ByVal pDisp As Object, URL As Variant)
If (pDisp Is IE) Then
	'Url could change so take care of it ;)
    If InStr(1, URL, "passport.com/cgi-bin/login", vbTextCompare) Then
            Dim inp As Object
            Set inp = IE.document.all.Item("login")
            inp.Value = "myname"  'replace with your id
            
            Set inp = IE.document.all.Item("passwd")
            inp.Value = "passwrd"  'replace with your password
            
            Set inp = IE.document.all.Item("enter")
            inp.Click
     End if
End If
End Sub

A variation:

Private Sub IE_DocumentComplete(ByVal pDisp As Object, URL As Variant)
If (pDisp Is IE) Then
	'Url could change so take care of it ;)
    If InStr(1, URL, "passport.com/cgi-bin/login", vbTextCompare) Then
            IE.document.all.Item("login").value = "myname"  'replace with your id
            
            IE.document.all.Item("passwd").Value = "passwrd"  'replace with your password
            
            IE.document.all.Item("enter").Click
     End if
End If
End Sub

We are almost finish. To actually read mails from Hotmail, you need one more click. I will let you know how to automate this by yourself.

Hope you have enjoyed that work as i did.
;)