Activate a Button on a WebPage using VBA on MsAccess - vba

Question

Hi I am trying to write a scraper to get data from this website (www.coned.com/tcisng) and dump data into my Ms Access Backend. When I navigate to it and enter in my credentials (username and password), it does not activate the "Log In" button which I want to click next as it is the next step on my scraper. Also this "Log In" button has no name or ID. How to activate and make it click using VBA in Ms Access 2016.
Updated Code Snippet -
Dim ie As Object
Set ie = CreateObject("internetexplorer.application")
ie.Visible = True
ie.Navigate "www.coned.com/tcisng"
While ie.Busy
DoEvents
Wend
Do
DoEvents
Loop Until ie.ReadyState = READYSTATE_COMPLETE
ie.Document.all("LoginEmail").Value = "myemail"
ie.Document.all("LoginPassword").Value = "myPassword"
Do
DoEvents
Loop Until ie.ReadyState = READYSTATE_COMPLETE
While ie.Busy
DoEvents
Wend
'ie.Document.all(48).Click
'ie.Document.querySelector("[type=submit]").Click
ie.Document.querySelector("button[title*='Log in']").Click
In the last 3 line I am trying to select the "Log In" button but it is disabled, also it has no name or ID, can you also help what exact code to replace in order to activate the button and click it later.

Answer 1

Instead of trying to "click" the button, try submitting the form. The Javascript for that ConEdison page would be:
document.getElementById("form-login-email").form.submit()
In the "old days", with just a plain form, this would work fine.
But on that website there is a lot more going on. That email input element has nine events attached to it. By just filling in the value, you aren't triggering any of those events.
With forms built with ReactJS, for example, the user's interaction with the Input element is monitored, and the value is extracted and stored in a non-displaying object in the DOM tree. When the Submit button is clicked, the form's visible Input elements may not be used at all. In order to feed inputs into such forms, you need to understand ReactJS data structures, and manipulate them directly.
I recently built a scraper based on Chromedriver, which allows a Chrome browser window to be controlled from an external program, such as Access VBA. Once started, Chromedriver runs as a mini-webserver on localhost, and commands sent to it from Access VBA (through a ServerXMLHTTP60 object) cause it to launch Chrome, visit a URL, send keystrokes to input elements etc. Within the browser, the keystrokes fire all the events that human keystrokes would do. The target website was ReactJS-based, but I was able to ignore all of the internal complexity of ReactJS.
Since the website runs in a regular Chrome browser, I was able to use F12 Developer Tools in the development process.
The technology is Webdriver, and was developed for building website testing tools. There are Firefox and MS Edge Chromium versions as well.