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)

UI Automation navigator

In cases where it's difficult to locate the element on the screen using the mouse, we have the option of using the navigators. Navigators scan an entire page for elements that can be identified and present it as a list. All we need to do is to select the element that we want from the list. These elements are located in the sub-menu (refer to the following screenshot) that appears when you click on the arrow next to the Identify button.

The menu has three options:

  • Spy Element: This is the default option and is the one that we have used to identify elements in HTML and UIA mode by clicking on them in spy mode.
  • Open Application Navigator: This option uses the older AA framework to scan the entire page for all the elements that can be identified.
  • Open UI Automation Navigator: This option also scans the page for elements, but it uses the newer and better...