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.

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Robotic Process Automation with Blue Prism Quick Start Guide
Lim Mei Ying
Nov, 2018 | 232 pages
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Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Preface
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Get in touch
Free Chapter
1
The Case for Robotic Process Automation
The Case for Robotic Process Automation
What is robotic process automation?
Finding a process suitable for automation
The process definition document
Summary
2
Building the First Blue Prism Process
Building the First Blue Prism Process
Inside a Blue Prism system
Launching the Blue Prism interactive client
Creating the first process
Getting to know the Blue Prism Process Studio
Join the Blue Prism community
Summary
3
Pages, Data Items, Blocks, Collections, and Loops
Pages, Data Items, Blocks, Collections, and Loops
Taking a closer look at the toolbox
Pages
Inputs and outputs
Data items
Blocks
Collections
Loops
Checking for errors using the validation tool
Summary
4
Actions, Decisions, Choices, and Calculations
Actions, Decisions, Choices, and Calculations
Actions
Decisions
Choices
Calculations
Multi calc
Summary
5
Implementing Business Objects
Implementing Business Objects
What is a business object?
Creating a business object
Taking a look at Business Studio
Ready, start, action!
Introducing the Application Modeller
Using the Navigate stage
Publishing an action
Using a custom Business Object from a process
Summary
6
Spying Elements
Spying Elements
Spying elements on a web page
How does spying work?
Tweaking the match criteria
Tightening the match criteria
Adding elements
Categorizing elements
More spy modes
UI Automation mode
UI Automation navigator
Surface automation with region mode
Summary
7
Write, Wait, and Read
Write, Wait, and Read
Creating the search action
Writing to text boxes
Clicking buttons
The Wait stage
The Read stage
Using dynamic match attributes
Actions have inputs and outputs too
Try it yourself – clicking Add to Cart
Putting it all together
Summary
8
Working with Excel
Working with Excel
Reading the shopping list from Microsoft Excel
Importing the Excel VBO
Using MS Excel VBO to open, show, and close Microsoft Excel
What is the MS Excel VBO made up of?
Opening an Excel file
Reading an entire worksheet into a collection
Writing to a cell
Considerations for comma separated values (CSV)
Summary
9
Sending and Receiving Emails
Sending and Receiving Emails
Using the MS Outlook VBO to manage emails
Receiving emails
Summary
10
Control Room and Work Queues
Control Room and Work Queues
Introducing the control room
What are work queues?
Summary
11
Exception Handling
Exception Handling
Expected and unexpected exceptions
Raising exceptions
Handling exceptions
Debugging and troubleshooting from the control room
Summary
12
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Tweaking the match criteria

Earlier, when we spied the Search textbox, Blue Prism came up with a list of suggested match criteria to correctly identify the element, as shown in the following screenshot:

All these conditions must be satisfied in order for the robot to locate the Search textbox. What happens if Amazon decides to change the appearance of the textbox and give it a different class name?

Well, we can't hack into Amazon's site and effect the change. For the purposes of the demonstration, let's simulate that by changing the Class Name attribute from nav-input to nav-input2.

Now, click the Highlight button again. Oops, are you getting the same error message as the one here?

What just happened? We only changed the value of one of the many match attributes. Why isn't Blue Prism able to find the Search textbox now? The answer lies in the way matching...

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