Book Image

Learning Robotic Process Automation

By : Alok Mani Tripathi
Book Image

Learning Robotic Process Automation

By: Alok Mani Tripathi

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

What this book covers

Chapter 1, What is Robotic Process Automation?, In this chapter, readers will get to know about the history of automation and the advent of RPA. What types of automation can be categorized as RPA? What do future analysts predict? Who are the major players in the market? What are the benefits of RPA? All this is covered in this chapter.

Chapter 2, Record and Play, In this chapter, readers will be introduced to UiPath Stack and Process Designer/Studio, and will use wizard-based tools to quickly automate mundane tasks.

Chapter 3, Sequence, Flowchart, Control Flow, examines the project that was generated by the recorder and get an explain the program flow (Workflow). Readers will also understand the use of sequences and the nesting of activities. Readers will learn to use the building blocks of a Workflow Flowchart and Control flow (for looping and decision making).

Chapter 4, Data Manipulation, teaches techniques to use memory with variables. Readers will also learn about data tables to store data in and easy ways to manipulate data in memory. This chapter also shows how disk files (CSV, Excel, and so on) are used to persist data.

Chapter 5, Take Control of the Controls, states that extraction is a primary feature of RPA which enables UI automation. Behind the scenes, many technologies are at work to seamless extract information from the UI. When typical RPA techniques are not successful, OCR technology is used to extract information. In this chapter, readers will learn about various selectors available in UiPath to extract and take action on controls. We will use one browser-based application to accomplish the task explained in each section. In the end, we will automate one Windows application task.

Chapter 6, Tame that Application with Plugins and Extensions, UiPath has many plugins and extensions to simplify UI automation. Apart from basic extraction and interaction with the desktop screen, these plugins allow users to directly interact with that application or simplify UI automation. Readers will learn about the use of these plugins and extensions. Each section has examples and use cases.

Chapter 7, Handling User Events and Assistant Bots, in this chapter, readers will learn about Assistant bot its utility. All monitoring events that can be used to trigger actions have been covered, and two examples of monitoring events have also been given.

Chapter 8, Exception Handling, Debugging, and Logging, in this chapter, readers will learn to use exception handling techniques, log errors screenshots, and find out other useful information to be used for debugging or reporting. Readers will learn how to debug code.

Chapter 9, Managing and Maintaining the Code, covers the organization of the project, modularity techniques, workflow nesting, and using a TFS server to maintain versions of the source code.

Chapter 10, Deploying and Maintaining the Bot, in this chapter, readers will learn about publishing utility and Orchestration server. Readers will also learn how a production environment is prepared.