Normally the TAG commands work the way they are recorded by iMacros, but sometimes you need to manually fine tune them. If an error occurs during replaying a TAG command, it might be due to one of the following problems.
Wildcards
Some web sites are created dynamically from databases and the links contain unique numbers - the so-called session ID - each time you visit a page. While this technique helps the web site owner, it poses a problem to iMacros. This is because during recording the session ID, which is often part of links, was written into the macro as part of the TAG command. During replay, the session ID is different, thus iMacros does not find the exact link and produces an error. The solution is to replace the changing part of a link (or extraction) with the * symbol, which is read by iMacros as a wildcard. The wildcard causes iMacros to except any character where the * is placed.
Example:
Tag line as recorded by iMacros:
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=ACTION:/kb/ki.dll/ke.kb.gz?kbb;532452&&2&&&&&nc ATTR=NAME:zipcode CONTENT=85250
If you record the same macro a second time, you will see that we get the same TAG line, except one number - this is the session ID the website is using.
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=ACTION:/kb/ki.dll/ke.kb.gz?kbb;532244&&2&&&&&nc ATTR=NAME:zipcode CONTENT=85250
Replace the session ID with *:
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=ACTION:/kb/ki.dll/ke.kb.gz?kbb;*&&2&&&&&nc ATTR=NAME:zipcode CONTENT=85250
Actually, you could also remove most of the static parts of the FORM information as well. Exactly how much you can remove depends on the website. You still need enough information for iMacros to uniquely identify the page element. In our example, the result looks like:
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=ACTION:/kb/* TTR=NAME:zipcode CONTENT=85250
Page URL http://www.iopus.com/imacros/help/tunetag.htm