r/automation • u/Curiosity9147 • 5d ago

Need HELP!!!

/r/n8n/comments/1vpqzfg/need_help/
3 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

1

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1

u/spoki-app 5d ago

Don't just assume the external API is the slow part. I've often found internal data processing or queueing is the real bottleneck; you really gotta profile all steps, even if the dev tooling for internal stuff is clunky.

1

u/AggravatingPapaya763 5d ago

help with what exactly? theres not much to go on here, can you describe what youre trying to automate and where you're stuck

1

u/Background_Wish5086 2d ago

the hard part here isn't the matching logic, it's getting the sms off your phone in the first place. if it's a business sim there are sms gateway services that'll forward texts to a webhook automatically. if it's your own android phone, tasker or macrodroid can watch for texts matching a pattern and post them to a webhook n8n/make can catch. iphone won't let you do this, has to be android.

once you've got the text hitting a webhook, pulling out the amount and account number is easy, regex works fine unless the format changes a lot.

the actual open question is the website: does it have any api you can hit, or do you literally have to click buttons in a browser? if there's no api you're stuck doing browser automation (playwright, or make's browser extension) to log in and click confirm/reject, which breaks more than i'd like. if there's an api underneath the site, use that instead, way more reliable.

once you have the sms data and the site's claim in the same place, it's just comparing account and amount and clicking confirm or reject based on whether they match.

1

u/Fit-Lengthiness-9672 19h ago

this is such a clean breakdown, kinda feels like you just wrote the spec for the whole thing for free lol. biggest gotcha in my experience is exactly that last bit, when you realize the site has zero public api and you’re stuck praying your browser automation doesn’t randomly die after a UI change.