UiPath RPA-Advanced Enterprise Robotic Process Automation

Here we'll take a look at the prerequisites for this course. And personally, I would like to share with the audience the unrealized prerequisites that we'll need in order to build reliable RPA processes. This is something that I've come to realize with my experience working with RPA.

Audience are requested to give this portion of the lecture a second thought.

In this lecture we'll take a look at the traditional Robotic Enterprise Framework and discuss some of reasons that lead to the development of the ERPA Framework template.  We'll discuss a few practical constraints using configuration files and the logistical pains that come with it. You'll see the reasoning behind why you might want to set up an Enterprise-like scenario regardless of the scale of your business processes.

In this lecture, we'll take a look at what we'll be learning for the rest of Section 4.

In this lecture, we'll deep-dive into the ERPA Configuration database named ConfigDB. The database is an MS Access file that comes packaged with the ERPA project template. We'll start with the traditional Config.xlsx configuration Excel file and make our way into the database design whilst drawing parallels between the Excel file and the database.

We'll also linger on the good and bad practices when interacting with a database, and why it justifies the need for an interface view.

By the end of this lecture, you should be comfortable with the first view of the configuration database.

Audience are requested to download the database that's attached as a resource to this section and also quickly breeze through the companion Readme.txt file.

In this lecture, we'll be moving the configuration database to a centralized location. The purpose of this move is to keep the configuration settings for all the ERPA processes across the enterprise in a central location. 

As part of the centralization, we'll unlock the database and then lock it down again with a password of our choice for security reasons.

By the end of this lecture, you should've relocated the database at a central location and locked it down with a new password of your choice.

Caution!

1. Please do not work with the default password -  change it preferably by the end of this lecture!

2. Also make sure to remember the password as you'll be requiring it for future access to the database

Note:

You'll need the databases attached to the previous lecture for this course. If your version of Office is not compatible with the .accdb file, then you can start with the .mdb database file.

In this section, we'll create a connection the Centralized configuration database without writing any code.

For this lecture, you'll need to have the following details from the previous lecture:

1. the full path to the central location where your database is situated

2. the password that you used to lock down the database

NOTE

• Please record the name of the connection that you create as part of this lecture

• from here on you'll need this connection name for all practical purposes

In this lecture, we'll confirm that the connection we set up to the configuration database works from outside of the MS Access environment. To do that, we'll use the Data Source Name (DSN) to connect to the database from Microsoft Excel and project the data from the interface view into the Excel spreadsheet.

This exercise will also give you an insight into how the ERPA process connects to this database to load the configuration settings. That said, we'll think a bit about the pros and cons of the approach that we've used to establish connections to the configuration database.

NOTE:

For this exercise you'll need the following from the previous lectures

1. The password used to lock down the database

2. The Data Source Name (DSN) created in the last lecture

A quick change of plan as we'll be covering the MasterConfig.xlsx file in the next chapter.

In this chapter, we'll be taking a look at the inner workings of the ERPA Process flow Framework, interchangeably referred to as the ERPA process flow template.

You can download this template from the UiPath GO! Marketplace:

https://go.uipath.com/component/advanced-enterprise-rpa-process-template

NOTE

Prior knowledge of the UiPath REFramework is immensely welcome to extract maximum benefit from this course.

We'll take a high-level look at the ERPA Template in the UiPath studio.  For purposes of completeness, we'll navigate along the main structure of the template and quickly cover all the State Machines.

We'll look at the enhanced Init State Machine by setting up requirements of a theoretical RPA process. Based on this process, we'll see what functions this State machine performs and segue into the MasterConfig.xlsx Excel configuration file that is a new addition into the framework.

Here, we'll get down into the Init State machine and see how it loads the process settings from the Configuration database that we centralized in the previous chapter. We'll tie the Interface View , the DSN connection, the MasterConfig.xlsx file and the traditional Config.xlsx file in this lecture.

We'll also see where you might want to alter the framework template if you choose to load settings from a remote configuration database using a Connection string instead of a DSN.

NOTE

If audience want a refresher on the database and how it was centralized, then now would be the time to step back into Chapter 4

In this short lecture, we'll go through some of the other minor but significant enhancements to the Init State Machine.

We'll deep-dive into using the feature queries in the Access Configuration database and use them to quickly and efficiently set up configuration entries for a new RPA process. We will also see how we can clone settings from existing projects and also delete them with minimal effort.

We'll use this knowledge to set up the Sample ERPA Process that we'll be building later down the line.

Selectors are the less glamorous by artistic part of building reliable RPA processes. We'll take a look at how to use selectors and selector expressions as parameters to our ERPA processes.

By the end of this chapter, you will have come up with a summarized list of Selectors and Selector Expressions that you will use to build a simple sequence that demonstrates the working of our Sample ERPA process.

We return to the sequence we built in the last lecture and enhance it to accept parameterized selectors and selector expressions. Then we'll quickly unit test it to see how well it handles success and failure scenarios.

Now, it's time to look at how the Robot is going to deliver the results after it as processed the incoming file. When automating the MS Access application database, we'll once again revisit why we might want to simplify our thinking to achieve our goal of successfully building this automation.

By the end of this section, we would've built up our sequence to process data end to end.

In this demo lecture, we'll bring all the functional components that we built up in this chapter into a realistic test harness, that would get a feel of how close we have gotten to building our Sample ERPA Process.

This is it! This is where put our end goal into action! We start organizing and creating the folder structures for our project and move on to setting up user-defined configurations for our process in the configuration database.

The functional components that we built into the realistic test harness at the end of previous chapter will be integrated into the various State Machines of our ERPA Sample application.  The way we organized these functional components will align with how we place them into the state machines.

A short introduction on how we'll test our Robot.

Here we put the Robot through a situation where it'll fail to perform its function, and see how it copes.

In this test we'll see how our Robot performs when faced with a 100% chance of success.

In this test, we impose a limit on how much data the Robot must process. We'll confirm if the robot will comply with the set limits.