Automatically filling in the UK COVID test results page with Selenium IDE

Lots of people are filling in the extremely detailed UK government COVID test result page twice every week.

It asks you to fill in a very large list of details, most of which are the same every time, but it doesn’t remember what you typed last time.

I didn’t want to write a Python script or similar to enter my results, because I wanted to check I’d done it right, and because there is a captcha at the end that is clearly intended to prevent automation like that.

However, with a Selenium IDE script, I can drive my browser, watching what it does and checking the input, and manually filling in the captcha and final double-check page.

In case it’s helpful, here is the script I created: report-covid-test.side.

You can create one for each child if you have several, filling in school name, NHS number, names, date of birth etc. in the script and re-using it, modifying it each time to enter the bar code number for the test itself.

To use it you’ll need the Selenium IDE plugin for firefox, or Selenium IDE plugin for another browser.

I’d recommend loading this script into the Selenium IDE plugin in Firefox, looking through it and editing the values that say “ENTER…HERE”, then clicking Run Script and watching it fill in values.

It doesn’t actually submit the result, so you can always check and modify it manually if something doesn’t work out, before clicking the last couple of buttons to submit.