Wait for window to reload when scrolling web page in VBA

Question

I have written a VBA macro to count the (approximate) number of images returned for a Google search of a specific term. By approximate I mean that the program should count the n

Answer 1

Just do this instead, I am sure you can find a nicer way to do it (if you think it's worth the time) but this should be fine :

newNum = -1
Set objIE = New InternetExplorer
objIE.navigate fullUrl
Do While objIE.Busy = True Or objIE.readyState <> 4: DoEvents: Loop
Set currPage = objIE.document
Do Until oldNum = newNum
    oldNum = newNum
    newNum = currPage.getElementById("rg_s").getElementsByClassName("rg_di rg_bx rg_el ivg-i").Length        
    Application.Wait Now + TimeSerial(0, 0, 2)
    currPage.parentWindow.scrollBy 0, 100000        
    Application.Wait Now + TimeSerial(0, 0, 2)
    If newNum > 400 Then newNum = 400
Loop

Then you just have to adapt the delay in TimeSerial depending on how fast your computer loads ( in here I set in to 2 seconds)

Answer 2

Through further research I've come up with this approach:

Dim myDiv As HTMLDivElement: Set myDiv = currPage.getElementById("fbar")
Dim elemRect As IHTMLRect: Set elemRect = myDiv.getBoundingClientRect
Do Until elemRect.bottom > 0
    currPage.parentWindow.scrollBy 0, 10000
    Set elemRect = myDiv.getBoundingClientRect
Loop
myDiv.ScrollIntoView

Where currPage is the HTML webpage (Dim currPage As HTMLDocument) and myDiv is a particular element. The type is not important, but it should be noted that myDiv is always located at the bottom of the document and is only loaded once everything else has been. So for Google images that's the help bar, which you only get to after scrolling through all the image results.

How it works

The code works as follows: myDiv.getBoundingClientRect is a way of checking whether an element is visible in the browser - that's why we need to look at an element at the bottom of the page, as if we scroll until that becomes visible, then everything else must have loaded too.

That's of course where the Do Until...Loop comes from; we loop until the elemRect.bottom value is not zero (as when the element is not in view, it's zero, once it's in view it becomes a non-zero number). More info on that see here

Finally, use a myDiv.ScrollIntoView to get the browser right to the bottom; this is necessary because the BoundingClientRect is visible slightly before the element is on screen, so we need to scroll the last bit in order to load the final images.

Why not just use ScrollIntoView form the start? It doesn't work, since the element hasn't loaded yet.