Container controls

When interrogating, you can add container controls to create logical views of the page. These views become pseudo-pages, and Pega Robot Studio then maps the application controls to these pseudo-pages. The hierarchy that is displayed in Pega Robot Studio reflects the browser's perception of the application.

Because each control is located within a parent container and each container has fewer children than the application, creating container controls allows Pega Robot Studio to find unique match rules more quickly and easily. The use of containers also speeds up the matching process, as only children in matching containers are matched.

Using the Default interrogation method creates controls without expressing the dependencies between the web application element. For example, a developer interrogates the Finance application, which is a single-page application. The developer uses the Select Element interrogation method to create a menu bar as a container for the menu elements, as shown in the following example: 

Creating controls of the menu items sets the controls as a child of containers and automatically places them in a hierarchy.

You can create a container during interrogation or by identifying a previously interrogated control as a container.

Use the Select Element interrogation mode to identify a control as a container during interrogation. The Select Element mode provides additional information about the DOM during interrogation. By highlighting an element in the Select Element dialog box, the control that the system is inspecting changes: you can create a standard control or a container control by using the buttons in the dialog box. Once you identify the element that you want to interrogate, you can create a standard control or a container control by using the buttons in the dialog box.

If you have a previously interrogated control that you want to identify as a container, right-click the control in the Palette and then select Make container. This option is available only during interrogation and after matching the control.

Pega Robot Studio automatically re-parents controls in the following situations:

• If you change a control to a container control, the system automatically re-parents the interrogated and matched items that comprise the children of the control.
• If you change a container control to a non-container control, the system re-parents the children of the container control and makes them siblings of the non-container control.

If you create a container control and the controls that are the children of the container are unmatched, use the FixParent or FixChildren feature. Pega Robot Studio compares all matched controls to the DOM and re-parents them as appropriate. 

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