Web Page Interaction 

I will start this topic by describing the problem/use case I had.

I have a number of Data Apps published on one of my KNIME Community Hub Team Plan spaces. I now want to give access to them to a number of people, who are NOT on my team. The way to do this, is to go to the Deployments tab and there one by one select the Data app deployments and give the new users access via the 'Manage Access' menu item (see screenshots below)

OK, this works.

But imagine I have 20 Data Apps and want to give access to 50 people each, and you can see this becomes a pian in the ass.

So, looking for a way to automate this, I found out about the Web Interaction nodes. They can be installed as an extension (under KNIME labs)  and allow you to, well, interact with web pages.

Futrher down is a screenshot of the Workflow I am working on to solve my problem. As you see it is very simple, just 2 nodes.

The first node, Web Interaction Start, Starts a browser session for remote-controlled web interactions. In its configuration, you basically select the browser you are going to use. If you check the 'Use headless browser' checkbox, you will not see 'what is happening' when running the Workflow, so while testing and debugging I leave this unchecked.

The second node, Selenium Recording Player needs some more explication. As its name implies it is a Player, so we will also be needing a Recorder. This browser plugin can be obtained from www.selenium.dev without cost.

I usually use Chrome, but when trying to install the Selenium plugin there I got an error saying it does not meet the Chrome security standards (November 2025) . I tried with the Firefox browser instead and there it installed without any issues.

After installing and activating the plugin in Firefox, you will get the following:

The next step is 'Create a new Project'. After naming the new project, you will see the following:

You can now press the REC button (marked in the red box). Selenium will then ask you for the 'base URL', the webpage you want to record the script for.

You can now interact with the webpage and when you are finished, press the same button to stop recording. Selenium will now ask you to name the 'test' you just recorded. You can now press the save button (the disc icon) to save your project file. Project files have the extension .side.

Now we can use this in our KNIME workflow to automatically reproduce it. In the configuration of the Selenium Recording Player node you just have to indicate the path to the Selenium IDE project file (.side) and the name of the test you want to reproduce.

I did this for my use case described above. In the video below you can see what happens when I execute the workflow. Not quite there, the process gets stuck, but I am getting close to my goal....

Although this is quite powerful, you have to be aware that it can also be quite 'fragile': if the design of the 'underlying' webpage is changed, your script probably will stop working, and possibly you will have to make a new recording. You can also manually change the recorded scripts within the Selenium IDE, but this is out of the scope of this topic for now. 

TIP: before starting your recording in Selenium, make sure you get a 'clean start'. In my case this included first logging out of KNIME hub and clearing the browser data and cookies in Firefox.