Robotic Process Automation with Blue Prism Quick Start Guide

Create software robots and automate business processes

Lim Mei Ying

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789614466
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Desktop Applications
• Index: Computer Science

Learn how to design and develop robotic process automation solutions with Blue Prism to perform important tasks that enable value creation in your work

Key Features

• Develop robots with Blue Prism
• Automate your work processes with Blue Prism
• Learn basic skills required to train a robot for process automation

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Learn why and when to introduce robotic automation into your business processes
• Work with Blue Prism Studio
• Create automation processes in Blue Prism
• Make use of decisions and choices in your robots
• Use UI Automation mode, HTML mode, Region mode, and spying
• Learn how to raise exceptions
• Get the robot to deal with errors
• Learn Blue Prism coding best practices

Who this book is for

The book is aimed at end users such as citizen developers who create business processes, but may not have the basic programming skills required to train a robot. No experience of BluePrism is required.

Write, Wait, and Read

In the previous chapter, we spied all the elements that we want to work with. Now, let's get the robot to interact with them. Using Business Studio, we will build a new search action that will enter keywords into the Search text box and click on the Search button to trigger the search, after which, it will get the list of search results and pick out the item to purchase and add it to the cart.

To put it all together, we will make use of the following new stages in Object Studio:

• Write
• Wait
• Read

Creating the search action

Let's have a quick recap on the business object that we are building.

We want to do the following:

• Search for the product by entering its name in the Search text box and clicking on the Search button
• Once the search results are displayed, we will get the listing and pick out the item that we want to purchase

To store this logic, let's observe the following steps to add a new action to the Amazon - Search business object:

1. Open Amazon - Search in Business Studio for editing.
2. Add a new action and give it the name Search. Open the Search action page for editing, and now we are ready to roll.

Writing to text boxes

Given a list of items to purchase, we need to enter the keywords to find the item that we want to purchase. To do that, observe the following steps in order to use the Write stage to enter text in online forms:

1. With the Search action page opened, add a new Data Item to the diagram. We will use it to temporarily store the search keywords. Give it the following property values:
   • Name: Keywords
   • Data Type: Text
   • Initial Value: Low Carb Granola Cereal
2. Drag and drop the Write stage beneath the Start stage. Double-click on the Write stage to open the Write Properties dialog and configure it as follows:
   • In the Name field, rename the stage to Enter search keywords.
   • From Data Explorer, drag Keywords into the Value field.
   • From Application Explorer, drag Textbox – Search into the Element field.

When done, click Ok to close the dialog.

3. Back in the diagram, use the Link tool to link all the stages together. The completed diagram should appear as follows:

Let's run the action to see whether it works. If you have not already done so, click the Launch button on the toolbar to launch the Amazon site in Internet Explorer. Once the site loads, right-click on the Start stage and choose Set Next Stage. Finally, click Run from the toolbar. Did you see the text Low Fat Granola Cereal being entered in the Search text box?

If there are multiple text boxes on the same form, you can use the same Write stage to enter all the text values at the same time. To do so, click on the Add button in the Writer Properties dialog. You can then specify another value to write and the text box to write it to.

Clicking buttons

The keywords are in the search box. All we need to do now is to click on the Search button. Earlier, we used the Navigate stage to launch/terminate Internet Explorer. Observe the following steps to use the same Navigate stage to act as a robotic hand to click on buttons:

1. With the Search action page opened for editing, break the link between Enter search keywords and End.
2. Drag a Navigate stage and drop it beneath the Enter search keywords stage.
3. Double-click on the Navigate stage to open its properties:
   • Give it the name Click search button.
   • In the Actions panel, drag Button – Search from Application Explorer and drop it into the Element field.
   • In the Action dropdown, choose Click Centre.

Click OK to close the dialog.

4. Finally, use the Link tool to link all the stages together, as shown here:

Give it a test run and see that this time, apart from just entering the keywords in the Search text box, the robot also clicks on the Search button to trigger the search.

The Wait stage

Did you notice that it takes a second or so for the search results page to load fully? As human users, before we type in boxes or click on links, intuitively, we know that we have to wait for the page to complete loading before we can do anything. Robots are not like that at all. If we don't stop it from doing so, the robot will attempt to look for the search results immediately after clicking the Search button. All pages take time to load, even if only for a split second. Robots do not wait and even before the page is fully loaded, it would assume that there were no results to be found.

This is where we introduce the Wai...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• About Packt
• Contributors
• Preface
• The Case for Robotic Process Automation
• Building the First Blue Prism Process
• Pages, Data Items, Blocks, Collections, and Loops
• Actions, Decisions, Choices, and Calculations
• Implementing Business Objects
• Spying Elements
• Write, Wait, and Read
• Working with Excel
• Sending and Receiving Emails
• Control Room and Work Queues
• Exception Handling
• Other Books You May Enjoy