Issue with DatePicker - RSelenium - datepicker

Question

I'm scraping publicly available data for academic research. The website I'm pulling the information from has a really annoying datepicker though. I'm not sure if they implement this to deter private companies from scraping criminal data but it seems pretty dumb.
Here's the url.
I can bypass the Captcha with my institutional credentials, FYI.
You can see code - minus the login information - below:
#Miami Scraper
rm(list=ls())
remDr$close()
rm(rD)
gc()
rm(list=ls())
setwd("~/Desktop/Miami Scrape")
library(httr)
library(rvest)
library(zoo)
library(anytime)
library(lubridate)
library(dplyr)
library(RSelenium)
browser <- remoteDriver(port = 5556, browserName = "firefox")
remDr<-browser[["client"]]
url <- "https://www2.miami-dadeclerk.com/PremierServices/login.aspx"
rD <- rsDriver(verbose=FALSE,port=4444L,browser="firefox")
remDr <- rD$client
remDr$navigate(url)
#Click the Logging In Option
#Log-in stuff happens here
url2 <- "https://www2.miami-dadeclerk.com/cjis/casesearch.aspx"
remDr <- rD$client
remDr$navigate(url2)
#Here, you will read in the sheets. Let's start with a handful
date <- c("02", "01", "01")
sequence <- c("030686","027910","014707")
seqbar <- remDr$findElement("id","txtCaseNo3")
seqbar$sendKeysToElement(list(sequence[1]))
type <- remDr$findElement("id","ddCaseType")
type$clickElement()
type$sendKeysToElement(list("F","\n"))
yearbar <- remDr$findElement("id","txtCaseNo2")
yearbar$clearElement()
prev <- remDr$setTimeout("2000")
yearbar$sendKeysToElement(list(date[1]))
Invariably, the datepicker defaults to 19 but this isn't systematic. I'm only beginning to develop the code but I notice if I use the same case information for two searches in a row that it'll switch from "02" to "19" regularly. If I switch to another case, it may not work either. I'm not sure how to deal with this datepicker. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I've tried a couple of things. As you can see, I've tried to clear out the default and slow my code, too. That doesn't seem to work.
Also one last note, if you line-by-line run the code it works but execution all at once won't run properly.

Answer 1

I can't test with R as can't seem to get RSelenium set up, but changing the value attribute of the year input box seems to work. In R it looks like there are two ways to do that.
Can't test, but something like:
year <- '02'
#method 1 using inbuilt method which executes js under hood
remDr$findElement('id','txtCaseNo2')$setElementAttribute('value',year)
#method 2 js direct
js <- paste0("document.querySelector('#txtCaseNo2').value='", year,"';")
remDr$executeScript(js)
Anyway, might be enough to get you on track for a solution.
I tested similar versions with Python successfully
from selenium import webdriver
d = webdriver.Chrome()
d.get('https://www2.miami-dadeclerk.com/cjis/casesearch.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1')
case_nums = ["030686"]
year = '02'
d.execute_script("document.querySelector('#txtCaseNo2').value='" + year + "';")
# d.execute_script("arguments[0].value = '02';", d.find_element_by_id('txtCaseNo2'))
d.find_element_by_id('txtCaseNo3').send_keys(case_nums[0])
d.find_element_by_css_selector('[value=F]').click()
captcha = input()
d.find_element_by_id('CaptchaCodeTextBox').send_keys(captcha)
d.find_element_by_id('btnCaseSearch').click()