Using Cypress to do RPA

Introducing automation is something I am extremely keen on. Recently, I have been using Cypress at work, an end-to-end testing framework for browser based applications.

I got the idea that Cypress could be used to do Robot Process Automation (RPA) through the use of GitHub actions. My idea was to:

• Implement a Cypress test suite which opened a specific website.
• Traversed the website, to find meaningful data.
• Email the data.
• Let GitHub actions start the process.

I look at the bond prices every day on Nasdaq to get an indication on which direction my mortgage is going. A good candidate to automate: let Cypress look at the mortage and send me the result on email such that:

• I do not have to remember to check every day
• I do not have to access the site manually and spend time on this.
• I get the result every day at a specific time, e.g. 10:00..

Implementation is super simple, write a test that opens the specific Nasdaq page, selects the element of interest and then emails the element of interest to me using an email client. For my tests, I used mail-slurp since it is free and works well.

The complete cypress code is here:

/// <reference types="cypress" />
import { MailSlurp } from "mailslurp-client";

let last = undefined;
const TO = Cypress.env("TO");
const API\_KEY = Cypress.env("API\_KEY");
const mailslurp = new MailSlurp({apiKey:API\_KEY});
const from = Cypress.env("FROM");

context('Actions', () => {
    it("Open Nasdaq", ()=>
    {
        cy.log(MailSlurp);
        cy.visit('http://www.nasdaqomxnordic.com/bonds/denmark/microsite?Instrument=XCSE0%3A5NYK01EA50');
    });

    it("Find Last", ()=>
    {
        cy.get(".db-a-lsp").should((e)=>
        {
            if (e != null)
            {
                last = e.first().text();
            }
        });
    });

    it("Email Last", async ()=>
    {
        //cy.log(last);
        await mailslurp.sendEmail(from,
            {
                to:\[TO\],
                subject:'0.5% kurs ' + last,
                body:last
            }
        ); 
    });
});

Quick and dirty. Three actions are defined:

• Open Nasdaq: simply opens the URL in question.
• Find Last: finds the price of the latest sale of the given bond.
• Email Last: emails me the result

Simple as that. Running the “test” does exactly that. To automate, I use GitHub actions to start Cypress on every push but also every day at 09:00 UTC time.

I will definitely try to identify more use cases where this can be applicable in the future.