dgtlmoon / dgtlmoon/changedetection.io

[feature] Visual Selector - offer to "just tell me when this text is no longer on the page" filter

Open
#2,207 0 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub
enhancement
Dominant language
Python
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Forks
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Avg merge
22h 52m
Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

Very often I can see that people are using the visual selector to follow some HTML element, but then what happens is that the page will change structure (like when the website has more stock available) and then the element they have clicked on can no longer be found by the automatically generated xPath

What would be better is to have the visual selector ask "Should I alert you when this text is no longer present on the page?" instead of locking in a very fragile xPath filter

for example. people use the VisualSelector for choosing the element of

containing "sold out" or "no results found"

implementation
- xpath scraper can have an extra attribute "has-unique-text", it would only offer the solution if the text is unique
- something like restock detector but "text detector"

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start with the visual selector and XPath scraper entry points, then trace how generated XPath filters are offered for selected elements. Review the existing restock detector behavior and determine how a unique text value could be identified and presented as an alternative. Done means the selector can offer text-presence monitoring for uniquely matching text without disrupting the existing XPath flow.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
backend, web-dev
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
38/100

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