Before proceeding further, if you want to understand the basics of robotic process automation, enroll and learn the course Automatix-tool of RPA.
In this course, you will learn in depth about RPA Express, which is a free tool from WorkFusion, and learn the basics about SPA.
What is RPA Express?
Basics about SPA
Difference between RPA Express and SPA
Platform monitor and Platform monitor panel
Automating web applications
About S3 File storage
Automating Excel
Brief about OCR and Inspector
Handling exceptions
About the Company: WorkFusion
About the Company: WorkFusion
WorkFusion is a New York-based company that provides solutions to automate retail industries, eCommerce sites and many more.
In this course, you will be concentrating more about RPA Express and Smart Process Automation (SPA), which are the products from WorkFusion.
RPA Express
Simple and effective automation is provided for teams and organizations.
It is a enterprise-grade automation software which supports productivity by saving time and money.
Installation is free and can be built easily.
It helps in scaling the business without increasing headcount.
Quality of work is increased.
Delay
It is a wait time for an action to take place.
It takes the input as a number and its unit is in milliseconds.
Await timeout
The bot keeps pulling the page for the time mentioned in the await timeout and performs the action.
When it's loaded, it processes the remaining actions.
Interested in learning more about Delay and Timeout in detail? Then, click here.
Components
RPA express combines the essential components that are needed by business people for successful automation.
Build - Editable and can be published fast.
Manage - By using control tower you can get a centralized view of bots and tasks.
Digitize - Built-in OCR is used to digitize the data.
Customize - Bots can be customized by using basic Java-based scripts.
Smart Process Automation
SPA, also called Virtual Data Scientist, is the patented technology of WorkFusion.
It combines cognitive automation, workforce orchestration, and robotics.
It helps in automating all types of operations easily by using Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Seamless governance, smarter bots, and sharper insights deliver full enterprise automation.
Components in Smart Process Automation
The following components help in dealing with SPA:
RPA - Bots are available for any application or data.
AI - It allows in segregating unstructured data.
Workflow - People and bots work together.
OCR - It helps in converting an image to the text.
Analytic - Bot monitoring is present, and data-driven decisions can be taken.
There are so many tools available in the market. What makes work fusion different? Read further to know.
Capabilities
These are the differentiators that make WorkFusion different from competitors.
Human-in-the-loop
If any new exception raises the task is escalated to the human worker to perform it. It becomes a new rule. By doing so, the cognitive services are becoming smarter.
Server-level deployment
Below are some of the advantages achieved by using server level compared to desktop in WorkFusion
Desktop exposure is minimized which helps in increasing security and speed.
If there is any action done by human workers, pattern data is generated. This helps to train the machine learning algorithms for automating more complex processes.
Moving On
Hope you now have a clear idea about what is WorkFusion and RPA Express?
In this topic, you are going to learn about:
Installation of RPA Express
WorkFusion Studio
Creating Record
Advantages of using RPA Express
Installation of RPA Express
You can download RPA Express by visiting to this location and click Download for free.
From workfusion, you will receive the RPAExpressDownloader.exe file.
Click Run. RPA Express is downloaded automatically.
The software is only supported for windows users.
It became a part of RPA Express from V2.0.
It has RPA Recorder and more advanced facilities.
One can launch WorkFusion studio from the workfusion tray menu.
Choose the workspace directory.
When the launching finishes, you can see “Welcome to WorkFusion Studio” page.
From WorkFusion Studio, you can get the examples of other recordings.
Steps to Create a Record
To create a new recording, click Start > New Recording, and give a name and press OK.
Recording can be performed in two ways:
Click on replace with the new recording
It records from the screen automatically. Click on replace with the new recording and perform the recording and click on stop.
It records all the actions, and you can play it.
By selecting actions in the action flow
Sometimes you can't capture the recordings by using built-in actions you can perform the recording manually.
Select the required action and drag it to the action library.
You can learn more about recording in the following topics.
You can also create a new recording by pressing 'F5'.
Hovering mouse pointer on a particular action shows you about why it is used. You can click the link to know more about it.
Advantages of RPA Express
It helps to automate the manual tasks like:
Copy and paste the data between different files.
Sorting the mails.
Extracting information from PDF's, Excel sheets, etc.
Moving On
In this topic, you are going to learn about:
Working of SPA
SPA using fields
Capabilities of SPA
Features of SPA
Working of SPA
In the previous topics, you have learned about SPA. In this card, you are going to learn about Working of SPA.
SPA helps in breaking complex steps into smaller tasks.
Tasks can be automated using rule-based automatics.
Tasks which require judgment are given to human workers.
Once it is done, it assures the accuracy of human and machine by using SQC(Statistical Quality Control).
Quality pattern data is applied to the machine learning algorithms.
Among them, the best performing algorithm is chosen.
The algorithm is deployed into production with the help of human-in-the-loop exception management, and new rules are generated for the automation.
SPA Used Fields
SPA has cognitive abilities, and it can easily handle complex tasks.
Below are some of the files in which SPA is used
Anti-Money Laundering
Drug coding
Customer experience management
Claims processing
Settlements
Regulatory compliance
SPA Capabilities and Tools
WorkFusion is one of the suppliers of successful SPA solutions.
WorkFusion made organization goals where only robotics or labor arbitrage can do the work.
It combines the three key levers:
Workforce Orchestration
Robotics
Cognitive Automation
Proceed further to know more about each of them in detail.
Capabilities
Workforce Orchestration
It can perform quality control and manage programmatically on any size workforce to improve the transparency.
By doing so, human productivity can be increased, and quality data can be generated to train the machine learning models.
Robotic Automation
It performs rule-based automation to eliminate the human effort required to operate desktop apps to manipulate and transporting structured data.
Cognitive Automation
Automation that watches human workers and extracts unstructured data by using GUI's during work.
Features of SPA
Below are the features of SPA
Control tower - It helps in managing the automation and configuring the platform.
Studio and Recorder - WorkFusion studio and RPA recorder are the desktop apps to code, test or troubleshoot bots.
Workspace - It is used for managing work queues and completing manual tasks.
Platform monitor - It is used for managing system health and status of the bot.
All these applications are interconnected.
Moving On
From this topic, you are going to learn about RPA Express and the various components available in it for automation.
Platform monitor
Platform monitor panel
Control tower
Overview of control tower
Business processes
Dashboard
Tasks
Secret vaults
Platform monitor panel has the following components
Open platform monitor
Control tower
Bot manager
OCR
RPA Recorder
S3 File Storage
Help
Send Report
open Quick tour
Generally, control tower and OCR is in OFF state by default, you have to start them manually on demand.
You will be learning about each of them in detail in the following cards
It is a web application to see the overall status of the process and components.
You can open the platform monitor by going to System tray => platform monitor panel => Open platform monitor.
It is available only when the RPA Express is launched.
If you have accidentally closed it, you can search for workfusion RPA Express in the search bar.
Read further to about the components available in platform monitor
It acts as a dashboard to display the overall health of workfusion components.
You can get the bot info by clicking on control tower -> Bot menu, it has a list of a number of robots running and the number of instances available.
Below are some of the components available in platform monitor
Bot manager is available in both the System tray and platform monitor.
Bot manager helps to run the recordings.
Processes - It displays the RPA System process.
Common board - It contains the commands needed for debugging and to manage the RPA Express. you can execute them by clicking on Execute.
Environment status - It gives the status of all the system components
Interested in learning more about platform monitor, then click here
Control Tower
Control tower plays a major role in RPA Express. It is used to:
Design, schedule, and run business process.
Create manual tasks.
Create and manage users.
Create and manage bot sources.
Starting Control Tower
Control tower is in off mode by default when you start the RPA express.
One can start the control tower by following the below steps
Start control tower from the tray menu.
Open the control tower.
Login using your credentials (username and password created during RPA Express installation).
Read further to know more about control tower.
Once the control tower is opened, you can see the dashboard of the following links :
Account Information
Business process
Manual tasks
Data stores
Secrets valut
schedules
Read further to know more about each of them in detail.
Account Information
You can view the account information in the top right corner of the screen. By using this, you can :
The current state of the license can be checked.
User settings can be updated.
It helps in backing up all your data.
Logout.
Business Process
It gives the list of the business process. It provides the following statuses:
Draft - It is not started yet.
Running - It is running currently.
Completed - Executed successfully.
Errors - It is started but not completed because of errors.
Task
Before proceeding to know about a manual task, it is essential to understand what is Task?
The task is generally referred to a unit of work allocated to the users. Generally, a business process is a combination of both tasks and manual tasks.
Tasks are categorized into two types:
Bot tasks
The tasks which are performed by the software robot.
Some of the tasks may raise the exception and needs human intervention. They are called human tasks.
Human tasks
It's primary responsibility to handle the tasks that cannot be handled by the bot tasks.
Read further to know about manual tas
Manual Task and Data Stores
Manual Task
It is a task done by a human, whether it can be a cloud worker or internal employee.
You can create, monitor and manage tasks in the task area of a control tower.
Data Stores
This module is the web interface to manage DB tables in the workfusion.
Field Scheme is used to define the column data and the structure of the data table store.
To manage the data stores, one should have data store modifications permission.
Secrets vault
Security is the major feature in any automation. RPA Express handles it by usingsecrets vault.
It is used to manage the secure storage from the Bot configs.
Bots can access this data during automation.
Data is encrypted and stored. It is not shown in any files, so, complete security is achieved.
Go to Configuration => Secret vault, to access the secret vault.
Scheduling
If you have some business process which should be executed depending on a timely basis you can deal it by using scheduling.
It helps in scheduling the business process so, that you can repeat the process on scheduled time.
To start a schedule, give a name and click on the start button.
Schedules can be paused or deleted if not needed.
Moving On
In this topic, you are going to learn about:
What is RPA recorder?
Recorder main window
Sections of RPA Recorder
Variables
Dealing with variables
Variable logs
Code perspective
RPA Recorder
It is one of the RPA Express components that has an ability for automating mainframe, web, and Desktop applications without the need for writing code or scripting.
Object recording approach is generally used to capture the object properties along with its values while recording. when executing the script, it tries to find the same images.
Surface-based or image-based automation Bot captures the images of elements which are active and searches for same images during the execution of the script.
Generally, this approach is used as fallback to support.
System actions like opening application, working with clipboard, switching to the specific window can be added while editing workflows.
RPA Recorder main window contains the following sections:
Recording toolbar
Recording window
Actions flow
Action properties
Actions library
Media files
Recorder variables
Proceed further to know about each of them in detail.
Recording Toolbar - It contains buttons to perform the operations while recording.
Recording window - It appears when you start the recording or finish the recording.
Actions flow - This window displays the recorded steps along with main parameters.
Action properties - It contains the properties of the selected action where the parameters can be edited.
Actions library - It is a collection of all the items to be added in Actions flow without the need of recording them.
Media files - It contains all the recordings of projects.
Recorder variables - It contains the variables which are used in the recording.
In the previous card, you learned about what are media files. In this card you are going to learn more about them.
Each recording in media files is represented in the form of folders, it contains screenshots and recording scripts.
If you like to copy one recording to another, copy the folder to avoid losing screenshots and inconsistency.
To take backup of recording, create a new folder and copy entire folder there.
Recording can be published to the control tower as a new bot task for the business process.
If the recording is new, you can publish it as a business process by using publish to the control tower as a new business process.
If it is an old one and any modifications should be done, you can publish to the control tower.
Variables are used for storing the initial values or the runtime values of a process.
You can create, edit or delete variables in the recorder variables panel.
Types of variables :
String
Number
Boolean
DateTime
List
Table
Secret
You will know about how to use the variables in the upcoming topics.
Once the variables are created, they can be used in action parameters.
E.g., IF conditions, Enter Keystrokes
Start typing the variable name and you can get the prediction.
${} symbol is used to wrap the variable name in RPA recorder automatically.
By deleting wrapping symbols, the whole expression is treated as string.
Using variables
Recorder variables are used in free text fields like
Path to application
Path to file
Web element
Once the recording is done completely, a log file is created in the recording folder as shown in the picture.
Final values of recorder variables are stored in the log file.
Code Perspective
The recording is one of the perspectives of WorkFusion studio.
You can perform the recording in an advanced way by using Code perspective.
It can be added by clicking on Code button from code perspective.
You can switch between recorder and code perspective as needed.
Moving On
In this topic, you are going to learn about:
OCR in WorkFusion
OCR Action properties
s3 file storage
Functions of s3 file storage
Uses of s3
It is used for image recognition and helps in writing the recorded text to a string variable.
OCR has to be added manually.
It recognizes the images that are present in numeric and Latin characters.
OCR plugin should be running before playing the recording.
Below are the properties available for OCR action
Capture new image - To click the new image.
Choose new image - To select the image which is already existing in your local machine.
Put OCR Result into variable - To get the result from the image using OCR.
Advanced - it contains wait to delay to pause the action for a period of time (in milliseconds).
Comments - To describe why the action is performed.
The recorder variable should be of string type because the output from the OCR is of string type.
It is an Amazon Simple Storage Service with the web service interface.
It allows the user to store and retrieve the data anywhere and anytime.
S3 File storage is managed during the RPA Express setup.
You can access the S3 File storage from Platform Monitor menu => S3 File Storage.
Proceed further to know more about S3 file storage.
Functions of S3 File Storage
Once you open the file storage, you have the following options:
Browse content
Create new buckets
Upload/delete files
S3 Files are stored in the local as
C:\RPA Express\Workfusion\data\s3
Uses of s3
Here are some of the advantages provided by s3 for business processes:
It gets the input data for processing.
It stores the intermediate data files in s3.
It stores the output files.
Are you interested in learning more about s3 File storage? Then click here.
Moving On
In this topic, you are going to learn about:
What is an Inspector?
How to apply it?
Advantage of using inspectors.
Starting Inspector
Errors in Inspector
Inspector
It is a built-in tool for workfusion studio to identify the properties and values of objects depending on the location.
It is designed for "Advanced Selector Analysis" and it provides the selector of a particular desktop control.
You can use it when "capture from the screen" and "Replace with new recording" doesn't provide correct selector.
You can extract the selectors from any of the above solutions. The inspector is one among them.
Starting Inspector
One can launch inspector by logging into WorkFusion Studio and click Window => Inspector => Start inspector.
(or)
You can press Ctrl+shift+I to start the inspector.
Once you click Start Inspector, WorkFusion RPA Inspector will appear.
Refresh Process List: It contains the list of currently running process. You can perform the inspection on it by double-clicking on it.
The bottom left window is used for displaying the UI tree with all the elements in it.
By clicking on it, you can get "Unique object selector" for an individual element.
You can copy (Ctrl+c) and paste (Ctrl+v) it in the Selector element.
Inspector
Inspect is one of the main features for selecting the "selector".
Press "Ctrl" and navigate to the desired window and release Ctrl and select the desired element.
Target UI elements are opened automatically, and you can select the "Unique Object Selector".
You can cancel the live inspection by pressing Esc.
If you are already having a selector and don't know what it represents?
You can copy the selector and paste it in WorkFusion RPA Inspector and click Search. The searched element opens in the tree with all its details.
If you are searching for a non-existing control, it throws you "Element Not Found" Exception.
Moving On
In this topic, you are going to learn about:
Wait property
Loops
For Loops
Excel Actions
Automating excel Actions
Conditions
It is used to make the recorder wait for a period of time to search for images on the screen.
They cannot be recorded automatically. It can be dragged from actions library.
In wait, you have two options:
Wait - It pauses the bot for a particular amount of time.
Wait for image - Search is performed on a particular page, and the result is stored in a Boolean variable. If the image exists on the screen, it returns true else false.
Image to find, wait up to and save outcome to a variable are the properties of wait method.
Loops are critical to do repetitive tasks until the condition is met.
It is helpful to Iterate through the tables and lists.
Below are the loops available in RPA Express
While - It runs until the condition is false.
Repeat - It repeats a set of actions.
Retry - It repeats the nested actions.
For Each - It runs each element in List (or) row/column for a table.
Click here to learn about varaibles and loops in detail.
It is used for excel sheet manipulations like getting the data, setting the data, and saving.
Excel should be added manually from the actions library.
Benefits of Excel
Excel provides the following advantages:
Stability - System actions are reliable and quick than image based ones.
Speed of execution - Bot execution is done in the background only the result is displayed.
Active window - An Active window is not needed for excel.
Readability - Even new users can understand the flow.
Below are some of the actions available for excel.
Open spreadsheet - It takes the path for excel.
Save spreadsheet - This saves the spreadsheet as the same file or new file.
Switch to sheet - You can move to the specific sheet in excel by using name or number.
Set active cell - Particular cell is selected by using coordinates or position.
Set cell value - You can set the value by using coordinates or position
Get cell value - You can get the value of the particular cell and save it.
Automating Excel
There is a list of companies, who are having a set of employees. Perform automation to know whether it's a small scale or large scale organization depending on the number of Employees
Click here to know how it can be achieved using RPA Express.
Why Excel?
The main reason for using Excel is that all the process is executed in the background, and only the result or output is visible to the user.
Try-it-Out
Hope, now you get an idea of how to use excel in the automation.
It's task time. Perform automation that takes the input of students name and their marks on excel sheet.
Students who got above 40 is Pass, and less than that is Fail. Perform automation.
If else condition is used to check the workflow execution depending on the conditions.
If the condition is true, then if block is executed.
If the condition is false, then else block is executed.
Moving On
In this topic, you are going to learn about:
What is a web group?
Elements of web group
Accessing local HTML files
How to perform web automation?
Advantages of using web automation.
Mouse and keystroke Actions
Secrets vault
How to add secret vault?
Advantage of using secret vault
To automate the web actions, there is a group called web group in WorkFusion Automation Studio.
It helps in automating the web applications based on web elements rather than images.
It makes the script readable, and requires fewer actions.
Web group consists of two elements as shown in the figure:
Open website
Web Element
Proceed further to know about how to access each of them
Open Website
It is used for opening a specific website.
Drag and drop the open website in Actions flow and specify the address on "Site(URL)".
Select the browser on which you like to perform the search. It provides two browsers: Chrome and Firefox.
Wait up to helps to set the max wait time of a browser in milliseconds to load a web page.
If you like to erase all the browsing history, then select "Incognito mode" It resets all the cookies, passwords and history.
Open website can contain other actions. You can drag and drop to the open website action.
Web Element
It is used to get and set the value to variables.
web element uses XPath to search its elements.
It contains "get value" and "set value".
If you choose get value, the value is obtained by using XPath and the result is saved in a variable.
If you choose set value, the value of the variable is set to the element obtained by XPath.
You can get the temperature of a city by using web elements.
Local HTML FIle
You can also use Open website for the local HTML files to open them.
For Example,
file:///C:/Test/Web/Microsoft.com.html
Getting Xpath
You can get Xpath of web element by right-clicking it => Inspect => Right-clicking the blue highlighted area and selecting copy => Copy xpath.
Paste it in the XPath area, and the desired element is found.
Switch to Window
Switch Window- It is used to go for a particular window.
Parameters are:
Window - Give the name of the window.
Put search result into variable - The text is stored in the variable.
Delay before action - To specify the delay time.
Interested to learn more about switch window? Then, click here.
Advantages of Using Web Actions
Below are some of the advantages of using web actions:
Stability - Actions are faster than image-based ones.
Readability - Action flow can be easily understood.
Fewer actions - You can easily access the web actions.
Launch options - Browser type, element locator (XPath), Private selector, etc. can be set.
Mouse Actions
It helps to interact with the user interface by using mouse. They are automatically recorded during the recording process.
Below are the actions related to the mouse:
Mouse Move - It searches for the captured image when the mouse stops for <1 sec.
Mouse Click - You can perform it in two ways: Click on the image and Click on coordinates.
Mouse Drag - It represents drag and drops functionality from one area to another.
Mouse Scroll - It occurs when you scroll the page by using the mouse wheel in the vertical scroll.
You can change all these actions from the settings, and you can select any of the above mouse actions from the list.
Eager to know more about mouse actions? Then click here.
Keystroke Actions
Below are the keystroke actions in RPA Express:
Key combination
Type text
Text from variable
Below are some of the keyboard shortcuts used in key combination:
win+n new tab, win+R command prompt
Interested in knowing more about keystroke actions? Then click here.
In the previous topics, you have learned about secret vault in the control tower. It's time to learn about secret vault in WorkFusion studio.
Secret vault is used for storing the sensitive information.
Data stored in secret vaults will not appear in any logs, bot configs, system files or recordings.
As the confidential data is not exposed to the script can be shared with others.
Proceed further to know how to add secret vault.
12 of 14
You can go to secret vault by clicking on window=>Prefernces=>Workfusion studio=>Secrets vault
Click Add to add a secret vault.
Insert Key, and alias value. They can be used in the variables.
To use the secret key vault, select the variable type as secret and give the names in default values.
You can keep either the key or value or both of them in the encrypted format.
Moving On
In this topic, you are going to learn about:
Application
Launchingapplication
Window
Actions related to window
Introduction
Have you ever felt bored by copying the data from the application to the excel and saving them depending on the search results.
Don't worry. RPA Express Application helps you to handle tasks in easily.
Proceed further to know more about Desktop Automation.
To perform desktop automation, there is Application available in the actions library, it has a set of features.
It provides all the possibilities for managing and switching between the active windows on which the bot is interacting.
Launch Application
window
Maximize window
Minimize window
Close Window
Get window title
You will know about each of them in detail in the following cards.
It opens the particular application and switches to it.
It is a stable way of opening an application rather than clicking on the Toolbar/Desktop icon or typing the application name in the starter menu.
Parameters:
Executable file or command - You can select the path of the file or command which should be opened.
Autodetect window - If this function is enabled, the bot switches to the new application window.
Advanced - Used to set the delay time.
It helps in performing two major actions
Switching to the desired window
It can also function as a root element.
Parameters are
Modes
Select an open window - Choose the application window, if it is not available to open the application and click refresh.
Enter window title or part of title - The application can be searched depending on its name, Once it is found it switches to that particular window.
Output -> Put search result into variable - It contains the results of the window. True if found, false if not found.
Timeout -> Switch timeout in milliseconds - It helps to set the max wait time to switch the window.
Maximize Window - It helps in maximizing the screen window.
Minimize window - It minimizes the screen window.
Close window - It closes the window which is open.
Get window title - It saves current window title in a string variable, and it can be used in the further steps of automation.
Interested in learning more about automating applications inside window element then click here.
Moving On
In this topic, you are going to learn about:
Error Handling.
How error handling is achieved?
Use of error handling.
How to add error handling
Delays and Timeouts
Introduction
Have, you ever thought of what happens to automation if any error is raised during the automation?
Don't worry. There is a superhero, who can handle the exceptions raised during the automation.
Proceed further to know more how it is handled?
It helps to handle the exceptions that are raised during the automation by using try-catch.
It is present in the actions library.
It has two blocks:
Try to complete - It contains actions which may lead to the error.
If an exception occurred - If Try to complete throws an exception it is handled by using this block
It has wait parameter to wait for the automation before processing the automation.
Execution
Bot handles the workflow execution in the following way
It executes Try to complete set of blocks one after another.
If no exception is raised, it skips executing If an exception occurred, and all the child actions are moved to the consequent actions.
If any exceptions are raised, it skips the child actions and the statements inside If an exception occurred is executed.
Interested to know more about more about exception handling? Then click here.
Summary
Finally, you are at the end of the course. Let's recap what we have walked through in this course.
What is RPA Express?
Basics about SPA
Difference between RPA Express and SPA
Platform monitor and Platform monitor panel
Automating web applications
About S3 File storage
Automating Excel
Brief about OCR and Inspector
Handling exceptions
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