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)

Checking for errors using the validation tool

We have completed building a draft of our process. Have we made any errors? Blue Prism is shipped with a validation tool to help us look for any configuration errors that we may have unwittingly made. Well, it's not going to go through your code to check to see whether the Robot bought the correct products or emailed the correct people. It's more like the spelling and grammar check tool in Microsoft Word. Instead of spelling and grammar checks, the validation tool looks for configuration errors in our process, such as:

  • Stages that are not linked to anything
  • Missing data items
  • Missing business objects
  • Missing links
  • Missing pages

Let's see if there are any configuration errors with the process so far:

  1. First, let's generate an error. Go to the Email Notification Page. Delete the link between the Start and End stage...