Download file from website using SendKeys in Powershell - powershell

Question

I'm trying to download an file from a particular website by clicking on the file icon. Website login works but i'm hoping to use keystroke "TAB" to navigate to the excel file and finally key "Enter" to download. Ran the code but resulted in the Powershell text of "FALSE". Any advice is appreciated! Thanks.
Reference: Table screenshot
$url = "https://abcdefg.com"
$username="test#gmail.com"
$password="TestPW"
$ie = New-Object -com internetexplorer.application;
$ie.visible = $true;
$ie.navigate($url);
while ($ie.Busy -eq $true)
{
Start-Sleep -Milliseconds 1000;
}
$ie.Document.getElementById("txtEmail").value = $username
$ie.Document.getElementByID("txtPassword").value=$password
$ie.Document.getElementById("Login").Click();
Start-Sleep -Milliseconds 10000
$obj = new-object -com WScript.Shell
$obj.AppActivate('Internet Explorer')
$obj.SendKeys('{TAB}')
$obj.SendKeys('{TAB}')
$obj.SendKeys('{TAB}')
$obj.SendKeys('{TAB}')
$obj.SendKeys('{Enter}')

Answer 1

Why are you doing that vs using web scraping to find the link you are trying to hit, and use the link URL directly?
Your post is really a duplicate of this Q&A.
Use PowerShell to automate website login and file download
SendKeys could work, but they are very hinky and on different systems may not function as you'd expect. There are better tools dedicated to do this, AutoIT, Selenium, WASP
--- That WASP tool still works, but has not been updated in a long while.
Using PowerShell 2.0 With Selenium to Automate Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome
Internet Explorer
Next you want to obtain the Internet Explorer driver from this site. I
recommend version 2.41 because “as of 15 April 2014, IE 6 is no longer
supported”. This must reside in your current PATH so in your script
you may want to modify your PATH to ensure the executable
(IEDriverServer.exe) can be found there. If you’re wondering whether
to get the 32-bit or the 64-bit version, start with the 32-bit even if
you’ve got a 64-bit Windows.
At this point you’ll want to quickly instantiate Internet Explorer and
navigate somewhere. Great. Let’s do it.
# Load the Selenium .Net library
Add-Type -Path "C:\selenium\WebDriver.dll" # put your DLL on a local hard drive!
# Set the PATH to ensure IEDriverServer.exe can found
$env:PATH += ";N:\selenium"
# Instantiate Internet Explorer
$ie_object = New-Object "OpenQA.Selenium.IE.InternetExplorerDriver"
# Great! Now we have an Internet Explorer window appear. We can navigate to a new URL:
$ie_object.Navigate().GoToURL( "http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages" )
# This worked! The call won’t return until the page download is complete.
# Next let’s click on a link from the link text:
$link = $ie_object.FindElementByLinkText( "Spanish" )
$link.Click()
# display current URL
$ie_object.Url
Selenium Tutorial: All You Need To Know About Selenium WebDriver
Update for the OP
As for...
However the file does not have a redirected URL
Then you need to look deeper at the site, to find the anchor to the file that you can force click on.
Example:
# Scrape a web page with PowerShell
$w = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri 'https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerShell'
$w | Get-Member
$w.AllElements
$w.AllElements.Count
$w.Links.Count
$w.Links
$w.Forms
$w.Forms.Fields
$w.Forms[0]
$w.Forms[0].Fields
$w.RawContent
$w.ParsedHtml
once you find tag names, or the like, you need to parse that to get stuff out of it.
$w.AllElements | Where-Object -Property 'TagName' -EQ 'P' | Select-Object -Property 'InnerText'
For tables you have to dig more.
Extracting Tables from PowerShell’s Invoke-WebRequest