Book Image

Robotic Process Automation with Blue Prism Quick Start Guide

By : Lim Mei Ying
Book Image

Robotic Process Automation with Blue Prism Quick Start Guide

By: Lim Mei Ying

Overview of this book

Robotic process automation is a form of business process automation where user-configured robots can emulate the actions of users. Blue Prism is a pioneer of robotic process automation software, and this book gives you a solid foundation to programming robots with Blue Prism. If you've been tasked with automating work processes, but don't know where to start, this is the book for you! You begin with the business case for robotic process automation, and then move to implementation techniques with the leading software for enterprise automation, Blue Prism. You will become familiar with the Blue Prism Studio by creating your first process. You will build upon this by adding pages, data items, blocks, collections, and loops. You will build more complex processes by learning about actions, decisions, choices, and calculations. You will move on to teach your robot to interact with applications such as Internet Explorer. This can be used for spying elements that identify what your robot needs to interact with on the screen. You will build the logic behind a business objects by using read, write, and wait stages. You will then enable your robot to read and write to Excel and CSV files. This will finally lead you to train your robot to read and send emails in Outlook. You will learn about the Control Room, where you will practice adding items to a queue, processing the items and updating the work status. Towards the end of this book you will also teach your robot to handle errors and deal with exceptions. The book concludes with tips and coding best practices for Blue Prism.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we saw how pages are used to compartmentalize the logic of the process so that it can be broken down into smaller and maintainable units. We added inputs and outputs and saw how to pass information from page to page.

Next, we took a look at data items and observed how they are used to store all kinds of information that is used in a process. If we needed to store multiple rows of data, we use a collection instead of a single data item.

We also studied the all-important concept of loops. Robots were built to perform repeatable tasks, and loops are right in the centre of the action, getting robots to perform the same set of instructions over and over again.

Finally, we used the built-in validation tool to help check for any syntax errors that may have crept into the process.

In the next chapter, we will look at the remaining stage types used in processes...