Learning Robotic Process Automation

Alok Mani Tripathi

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781788470940
• eBook ISBN: 9781788396516
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Desktop Applications
• Index: Computer Science

Design RPA solutions to perform a wide range of transactional tasks with minimal cost and maximum ROI

Key Features

• A beginner's guide to learn Robotic Process Automation and its impact on the modern world
• Design, test, and perform enterprise automation task with UiPath
• Create Automation apps and deploy them to all the computers in your department

Book Description

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) enables automating business processes using software robots. Software robots interpret, trigger responses, and communicate with other systems just like humans do. Robotic processes and intelligent automation tools can help businesses improve the effectiveness of services faster and at a lower cost than current methods.

This book is the perfect start to your automation journey, with a special focus on one of the most popular RPA tools: UiPath.

Learning Robotic Process Automation takes you on a journey from understanding the basics of RPA to advanced implementation techniques. You will become familiar with the UiPath interface and learn about its workflow. Once you are familiar with the environment, we will get hands-on with automating applications such as Excel, SAP, Windows and web applications, screen and web scraping, working with user events, and we'll cover exceptions and debugging. By the end of the book, you'll not only be able to build your first software robot, but you'll also wire it up to perform various automation tasks with the help of best practices for robot deployment.

What you will learn

• Understand RPA
• Learn UiPath programming techniques to deploy robot configurations
• Explore various data extraction techniques
• Learn about integrations with various popular applications such as SAP and MS Office
• Debug a programmed robot including logging and exception handling
• Maintain code version and source control
• Deploy and control Bots with UiPath Orchestrator

Who this book is for

If you would like to pursue a career in Robotic Process Automation or improve the efficiency of your businesses by automating common tasks, then this book is perfect for you. Prior programming knowledge of either Visual Basic or C# will be useful.

Taking Control of the Controls

By now, you should be able to make fairly complex workflows and take various paths using control flows. You should now know how to store and evaluate variables to make a decision. I hope you are using a recorder extensively, as we will revisit the recorder in this chapter to learn more about it.

In this chapter, we will go into detail on how we can interact with the controls in the UI. Sometimes, you may need to click on a particular button or extract information from a textbox. Either we take some action on a control, or we read/write. We will go into detail on how to do this accurately. In this chapter, readers will learn about the various selectors available in UiPath to extract and take action on controls:

• Finding and attach windows
• Find controls
• Techniques to wait for a control
• Acting on controls—mouse and keyboard activities
• Working with UiExplorer
• Handling events

We will then discuss the recorder in a new context.

Extraction is a primary feature of RPA, enabling UI automation. Behind the scenes, many technologies are at work on the seamless extraction of information from the UI. When typical RPA techniques are not successful, OCR technology is used to extract information. We will learn about using OCR and other techniques in the following topics:

• Screen Scraping
• When to use OCR
• Types of OCR available
• How to use OCR

Finding and attaching windows

In this section, we are going to use the Attach Window activity.

The Attach Window activity can be found in the Activities panel. This activity is generally used to attach an already opened window. It is also auto-generated when we record actions using the Basic or Desktop recorder. You will get a much clearer idea after going through the example in the following section.

Implementing the Attach Window activity

In this example, we shall use the Attach Window activity manually. Here, we are going to attach a Notepad window and then write some text into it:

1. Create a blank project and give it a meaningful name.
2. Drag and drop a Flowchart activity on the Designer panel. Also, drag and drop a Click activity inside the Designer panel. Set this Click activity as the Start node.
3. Double-click on the Click activity and then click on Indicate on screen. Locate the Notepad icon.
4. Drag and drop the Attach Window activity on the main Designer panel. Connect the Attach Window activity to the Click activity.
5. Double-click on the Attach Window activity. Click on Click Window on Screen and indicate the Notepad window. The Notepad window is now attached to the previous activity:

6. For the sake of completeness, we are going to add a Type into activity. Just drag and drop the Type into activity, inside the Attach Window activity. Click on the Indicate element inside window and locate the Notepad window where you want to write the text. Write the text in the Text property of the Type into the activity.
7. Hit the Run button.

Finding the control

There are many activities which can be used to find controls on screen/ applications. These activities are used to find or wait for an UI element.

Following are the activities that help in finding the controls:

• Anchor base
• Element Exists
• Element scope
• Find children
• Find element
• Find relative element
• Get ancestor
• Indicate on screen

We will discuss all these controls one by one.

Anchor base

This control is used for locating the UI element by looking at the UI element next to it. This activity is used when we have no control over the selector. That means when we do not have a reliable selector, then we should use the Anchor base control to locate the UI element.

We can use the Anchor base control as explained in the following section:

1. Drag and drop a Flowchart activity on the Designer panel of a blank project. Also, drag and drop an Anchor base control from the Activities panel. Connect the Anchor base control with Start.
2. Double-click on the Anchor base control:

3. There are two activities that we have to supply to the Anchor base control: Anchor and action activities.
4. Drag and drop the Anchor base activity (for example; Find Element activity) in the Anchor field and Action activity (for example; Type into) in the Drop Action Activity Here field of the Anchor base control.

The Anchor base activity will find the relative element nearby the element on which you want to perform the Action, and the Action activity will perform the appropriate action that you have specified.

Element Exists

This control is used to check the availability of the UI element. It checks if the UI element Exists or not. It also returns a Boolean result if the UI Element Exists, then it returns true: otherwise, it returns false.

You can use this control to check for the UI element. In fact, it is good practice to use this control for UI elements whose availability is not confirmed or those that change frequently.

Just drag and drop the Element Exists control from the Activities panel. Double-click on it. You can see there is an Indicate on screen option. Click on it to indicate the UI element. It returns a Boo...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• Packt Upsell
• Contributors
• Preface
• What is Robotic Process Automation?
• Record and Play
• Sequence, Flowchart, and Control Flow
• Data Manipulation
• Taking Control of the Controls
• Tame that Application with Plugins and Extensions
• Handling User Events and Assistant Bots
• Exception Handling, Debugging, and Logging
• Managing and Maintaining the Code
• Deploying and Maintaining the Bot
• Other Books You May Enjoy