internet explorer - Using VBA Excel to navigate a website by changing dropdown value

Question

I am writing an Excel macro that will navigate to a utility company website and then download all of the statements linked to that account. To get to the statement download page, I need to navigate to each account's summary page. All of the accounts are listed in a dropdown - when I manually click a different account from the list, the page updates to the new account. Using the tip I got from this question, I am able to get the macro to change the dropdown value. The problem is, even though it chooses a new value from the list, the page doesn't update to the new account. Unfortunately, there is no direct link to each account's page as it looks like the dropdown passes a value to a script. I tried copying the URL down from different accounts, but no matter what account it's on the URL is the same. Here is VBA code in question:

Do While i < intNumberAcct
    ie.document.getElementById("ctl00_PageContent_AccountDropDown_BillingAccountsDropDown").selectedindex = i
    Call downloadStatement
    i = i + 1
Loop

I tried refreshing IE after it changes the dropdown value, but when it refreshes it reverts back to the original value in the dropdown. I also tried ie.document.getElementById("ctl00_PageContent_AccountDropDown_BillingAccountsDropDown").Click after it selected the new index, but it didn't have any effect.

Here is the html source code of the dropdown - I removed a large chunk of the accounts so it wouldn't be so long and obfuscated the account numbers and addresses with 'x':

<table style="width: 100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
    <td valign="top" class="AccountDropDownLabelCells" style="height: 25px;">
        <strong>Billing Account:</strong>
    </td>
    <td valign="top" style="text-align: left" align="left">
        <select name="ctl00$PageContent$AccountDropDown$BillingAccountsDropDown" onchange="javascript:setTimeout(&#39;__doPostBack(&#39;ctl00$PageContent$AccountDropDown$BillingAccountsDropDown&#39;,&#39;&#39;)&#39;, 0)" id="ctl00_PageContent_AccountDropDown_BillingAccountsDropDown" style="width:250px;">
          <option value="xxxxx">xxxxx(16 xxxxx Dr)</option>
          <option selected="xxxxx" value="xxxxx">xxxxx(18 xxxxxDr)</option>
          <option value="xxxxx">xxxxx(20 xxxxx Dr)</option>
          <option value="xxxxx">xxxxx(22 xxxxxDr)</option>
          <option value="xxxxx">xxxxx(28 xxxxx Dr)</option>
          <option value="xxxxx">xxxxx(30 xxxxxDr)</option>
          <option value="xxxxx">xxxxx(34 xxxxxDr)</option>
</select>
        &nbsp;
    </td>
</tr>


</table>

Any ideas on how to get the page to update to the new account after selecting it in the dropdown would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Once you set the index of dropdown you need to trigger the change event.

select name="ctl00$PageContent$AccountDropDown$BillingAccountsDropDown" onchange="javascript:setTimeout('__doPostBack('ctl00$PageContent$AccountDropDown$BillingAccountsDropDown','')', 0)" id="ctl00_PageContent_AccountDropDown_BillingAccountsDropDown" style="width:250px;"

doc.getElementById("xs_r_gender").selectedindex=1
doc.getElementById("xs_r_gender").FireEvent("onchange")