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)

Creating a business object

Let's see business objects in action. First, we will start with creating our very own Business Object, Amazon – Search. We add -Search to the end of the name for the purpose of describing what we want to do with the object.

In the Amazon – Search object, we will empower the robot to perform these actions:

  • Launch: Opens Internet Explorer and navigates to the page http://www.amazon.com
  • Terminate: Closes the Internet Explorer browser

As we progress through the build, we will add more complex stuff, such as the Search and Add to basket actions:

  1. Launch the Blue Prism interactive client. In the Studio tab, click on the Objects folder, the container that Blue Prism uses for storing all the Business Objects in the system. Notice that, like the Processes folder, the Objects folder has a folder named Default that was pre-created by the installer...