Robotic Process Automation for Developers

Building a process flow having tasks/activities, data flow and decisions, need robust workflow development capabilities. UiPath Studio provides three workflow diagrams to build process / task automations.

   •  Look at the overview of Sequence Workflow

   •  Learn overview of Flowchart Workflow

   •  See  overview of State Machine Workflow

Workflow should have ability to use functional unit of action commands to build automation workflows. Studio provides Activities to achieve this.

   •  Learn lowest automation unit i.e. Activity

   •  Understand some examples of Activities

   •  Look at the Activity Properties to configure and modify default behavior of the Activity

Communicating among automation activities and in different parts of the workflow, data of different types need to be stored and managed during runtime. Studio provides many Data Types and Variables to manage workflow data.

   •  Learn commonly used Data Types and creating variables in the Variables Panel

   •  See Variable Scope and Default values

   •  Explore data manipulation

Where and how to use Sequence Diagram?

   •  Explain Sequence Workflow

   •  Learn building Sequence Workflow

   •  Build a Sequence Workflow demo in Studio

Where and how to use Flowchart Diagram?

   •  Explain Flowchart Workflow

   •  Learn building Flowchart Workflow

   •  Build a Flowchart Workflow demo in Studio

Where and how to use State Machine Diagram?

   •  Explain State Machine Workflow

   •  Learn building State Machine Workflow

   •  Build a State Machine Workflow demo in Studio

Group of related activities need to be bundled. Studio uses Packages of related activities to provide automation of a certain application or a category of apps or use certain technologies in automations

   •  Understand packages

   •  Look at the Package Manager

   •  Install a package from the Package Manager

Identifying and accessing graphical user interface elements are keys to perform input and output actions on them. Studio provide UI Element automation activities to identify and access them for input and output actions.

   •  Learn UI Element types – Element, Text, Text Image, and Image

   •  Explore Input and Output Actions

   •  Build a demo in Studio for UI Element selection and interaction with them

Automations must have some mechanism to uniquely identify and interact with UI Elements at the development and execution time. UiPath Studio use Selectors to achieve this.

   •  Understand Selectors and its structure

   •  Look at the types of Selectors

   •  Work with selectors using wildcards & data variables through a demo

Selectors need to be stable, unique and optimized for interacting with UI Elements. UiPath provides a tool named UiPath Explorer (UiExplorer) to study and optimize selector for a given UI Element. UiExplorer also provides access to the entire visual tree structure of the entire UI Window.

   •  Explain various parts of the UiExplorer tools

   •  Explore how to use UiExplorer

   •  Demonstrate through a live demo

To build UI Automations, mouse and keyboard actions i.e. type and click actions need to be available. Studio provides complete set of mouse and keyboard actions in the form of activities.

   •  Explore Mouse Activities

   •  Understand Keyboard Activities

   •  Demonstrate many Mouse and Keyboard activities through live demos

To build UI Automations, ability to find and control an element at runtime is important. Studio provides complete set of find and control activities.

   •  Look at Find Activities

   •  Understand Control Activities

   •  Demonstrate many Find and Control activities through live demos

Can automations work faster than default automation of mimicking actions on the UI Elements through hardware? Can it work in background? Answer is yes. As the software robot sits inside the computer, it can access the applications in much better ways. UiPath provide multiple methods of input and output actions to achieve this.

   •  Learn three methods of input actions – default, SendWindowMessages and Simulate

   •  Learn Output Methods – Screen Scraping and Data Scraping Wizards and Activities

   •  Demonstrate the three input methods through live demos

How to extract structured, semi-structured and unstructured data? UiPath studio provides screen scraping activities as well as two wizards, namely, Screen Scraping and Data Scraping to extract structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.

   •  Learn “Screen Scraping” Wizard and activities to scrape un-structured data.

   •  Explore “Data Scraping” Wizard and activities to scrape semi-structured and structured data

   •  Demonstrate scraping structured, semi-structured and unstructured data through live demos

How to record user actions on user interface and generate an automation file? UiPath provides Recorders to achieve this.

   •  Learn about RPA ability to record the user actions on user interfaces

   •  Learn about recordable actions

   •  See non-recordable actions

How to record different type of applications and virtual environments? UiPath provides five different recorders to record different types of applications such as desktop, web and remote applications.

   •  Understand five different types of recorders

   •  Understand container type activities and recall understanding on full vs partial selectors

   •  Get to know that all recorders are similar. Only image recorder does not have automatic recorder

How to record entire series of actions by a user verses recording step by step actions? UiPath Studio provides Automatic and Manual recording methods to achieve this.

   •  Learn about automatic recording

   •  Learn about manual recording

   •  Understand that the skeleton generated can be modified as per needs.

How to record a single application for limited steps? Using UiPath Studio’s Basic recorder.

   •  Look at the Basic Recording

   •  See full selector based generated activities

   •  Learn to automate actions on a Notepad Application

How to record a multiple desktop applications environment for multiple actions? Also, how to record a web application? Using UiPath Studio’s Desktop and Web recorders, respectively.

   •  See Desktop and Web Recording

   •  Explore about partial selector based generated activities and use of containers

   •  Learn to automate actions on a Notepad Application and on a Web Application

How to record actions performed in an application running in a virtual machine? Using UiPath Studio’s Image recorder.

   •  See Image Recording

   •  Explore about Image Comparison and OCR Text Comparison based automation

   •  Learn to automate notepad application in a virtual machine environment

Can Citrix environment be recorded just like desktop recording? Yes, using UiPath Studio’s Native Citrix Recorder

   •  Learn about Native Citrix Recording

   •  Understand client and server pre-requisites to make the setup ready for Native Citrix Recording

   •  Understand that with the Native Citrix Automation setup, Citrix applications can be automated just like any local application

How to work with different types of data in communicating across activities and automations? UiPath provides wide range of Data Types that can take values from a simple integer to a complex data type such as MailMessage.

   •  Learn about Data Types

   •  Look at the categories of data types such as Scalar, Collection and Tabular

   •  See some common data operations

How to hold and organize data values of different types and communicate them across activities and workflow automations? Using Variables and Arguments, we will be able to hold data at runtime and share the data across activities and automations. Namespaces provides container to organize Data Types.

   •  Learn about Variables

   •  Explore Arguments

   •  Understand Namespaces

How to place order in which actions are performed in an automation? UiPath Studio provides activities for conditions and Loops to build control flows.

   •  Learn about the Control Flow activities in UiPath Studio

   •  Look at the condition-based activities such as IF activity

   •  See looping activities such as While and For-Each

How data can be manipulated for adding, removing, updating or fetching from different types of variables such as String, Array, DateTime etc.? UiPath provides DataType methods and activities to perform data manipulation operations.

   •  Look at manipulating String and DateTime

   •  See how to manipulate Array, List and Dictionary

   •  Understand how to manipulate DataTable

How to troubleshoot an anomaly in the automation and how to handle different types of errors that might occur during runtime? UiPath provides a debugger coupled with logging to debug automations and Error Handling mechanism to handle various runtime exceptions.

   •  Learn about UiPath Studio Debugger

   •  Explore Business and System exceptions

   •  See Error/Exception Handling

Excel files are often used for data collection, organization, analysis and for sharing. This work in many business environments is manual, tedious and error prone. RPA UiPath provides automating such tasks involving Excel file data.

   •  Use Application Integration Excel Activities to manipulate the excel data. Commonly used excel actions are available in the form of activities. For this MS Excel must be installed

   •  Use File Direct Access Workbook Excel Activities to manipulate the excel data. Only basic actions are available in the form of activities. MS Excel installation is not required

   •  Understand that UiPath provides activities for executing Excel Macros, VBA, Table operations, creating pivot table, etc

PDF files are commonly used document type in business processes such as Invoice Processing, Claims Processing, Customer Onboarding, Etc. Using UiPath PDF automation, PDF documents processing can be automated.

   •  See how the UiPath PDF package provides activities to extract large text data from Native as well as Image PDFs

   •  Look at how the UiPath uses OCR Engines to extract text content from image PDFs. Screen Scraping methods can also be used with PDFs

   •  Understand that the specific PDF document elements can be extracted using Get Text with or without Anchor Base

Emails are often used as inputs and outputs of steps involved in business processes. In many places, input files are received as email attachments (.xlsx, .pdf etc). Using Email Automation, steps in processes can work with such input files and send out emails for notification, alerts, reports, etc.

   •  Get to know UiPath activities are available for sending & receiving emails, downloading attachments, moving and deleting emails, etc

   •  Understand that all commonly used protocols are supported for sending and receiving emails (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, Exchange, Outlook)

   •  See how Credential Management activities are available to work with credentials from MS Credential Manager, Orchestrator Credential Asset and third-party products such as CyberArk

Managing distributed digital robots and processes can be a daunting task. Enterprise level operations such as Deployment, Execution, Scheduling, Workload Management, Managing and Controlling would be challenging. UiPath provides Orchestrator to address this challenge. Separately, building automations as per an established framework can eliminate many issues related to development. UiPath provides one such framework – Robotic Enterprise Framework.

   •  Look at the Orchestrator that provides web-based server software for centrally managing and controlling robots and processes

   •  Understand how the Orchestrator provides a secure, central command center, managing execution of processes with pool of robots and workload management features

   •  See how the UiPath’s Robotic Enterprise Framework provides a structured template for building automations by utilizing best practices such as configuration, logging, error handling, recoveries and retries, status management, etc