| name | handle-popup-blocked-pdf-downloads |
| description | Recover from automation-blocking PDF popups by capturing page data and escalating to manual download |
| version | 1.0.0 |
| source | auto-extracted |
| extracted | "2026-04-14T00:00:00.000Z" |
| metadata | {"tags":["automation","debugging","pdf","web-scraping"]} |
Handle Popup-Blocked PDF Downloads
When automating web forms that open PDFs in popup viewers (common in tax/financial software), the automation cannot access popup content. Instead of looping on failed downloads: (1) detect the popup block by attempting the action and checking for new tabs/files, (2) screenshot to confirm a popup occurred, (3) pivot to scraping the underlying summary data from the main page, (4) save the data to structured format, (5) create a GitHub issue documenting which PDFs need manual download and their reference IDs for human follow-up.