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Robotic Process Automation with Blue Prism Quick Start Guide

Robotic Process Automation with Blue Prism Quick Start Guide

by Lim Mei Ying
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Release Date: November 2018
ISBN: 9781789610444
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Book Description

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.

Downloading the example code for this book You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.PacktPub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.PacktPub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.

Table of Contents

  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright and Credits
    1. Robotic Process Automation with Blue Prism Quick Start Guide
  3. About Packt
    1. Why subscribe?
    2. Packt.com
  4. Contributors
    1. About the author
    2. About the reviewer
    3. Packt is searching for authors like you
  5. Preface
    1. Who this book is for
    2. What this book covers
    3. To get the most out of this book
      1. Download the example code files
      2. Download the color images
    4. Get in touch
      1. Reviews
  6. The Case for Robotic Process Automation
    1. What is robotic process automation?
    2. Finding a process suitable for automation
      1. Calculating time savings
    3. The process definition document
      1. Manual process description and target systems
      2. Process diagram
      3. Process details
      4. Exceptions
    4. Summary
  7. Building the First Blue Prism Process
    1. Inside a Blue Prism system
    2. Launching the Blue Prism interactive client
    3. Creating the first process
    4. Getting to know the Blue Prism Process Studio
      1. Adding pages
      2. Editing pages
      3. Renaming a process
      4. Saving a process
      5. Running the process for the first time
      6. Stepping through the process
    5. Join the Blue Prism community
    6. Summary
  8. Pages, Data Items, Blocks, Collections, and Loops
    1. Taking a closer look at the toolbox
    2. Pages
    3. Inputs and outputs
      1. Adding outputs to a page
      2. Adding inputs to a page
      3. Passing information from page to page
    4. Data items
      1. Adding a data item
      2. Making a data item visible across pages
    5. Blocks
    6. Collections
      1. Defining a collection
    7. Loops
      1. Adding a loop
    8. Checking for errors using the validation tool
    9. Summary
  9. Actions, Decisions, Choices, and Calculations
    1. Actions
      1. Adding an action to count the number of rows in a collection
    2. Decisions
      1. Adding a decision to decide whether to proceed to purchase the items
      2. Building an expression
      3. Validating expressions
      4. Evaluating expressions
    3. Choices
      1. Using a choice to determine the email address of the requester
    4. Calculations
      1. Calculating the email notification message
    5. Multi calc
    6. Summary
  10. Implementing Business Objects
    1. What is a business object?
    2. Creating a business object
      1. Organizing Business Objects into folders
    3. Taking a look at Business Studio
      1. Additional stages available in the Business Studio toolbox
    4. Ready, start, action!
      1. Renaming actions
    5. Introducing the Application Modeller
    6. Using the Navigate stage
      1. Launching applications
      2. Testing the launch action
      3. Terminating applications
      4. Testing the terminate action
    7. Publishing an action
    8. Using a custom Business Object from a process
    9. Summary
  11. Spying Elements
    1. Spying elements on a web page
    2. How does spying work?
    3. Tweaking the match criteria
    4. Tightening the match criteria
    5. Adding elements
    6. Categorizing elements
    7. More spy modes
    8. UI Automation mode
      1. When spying by identifying does not work
    9. UI Automation navigator
    10. Surface automation with region mode
    11. Summary
  12. Write, Wait, and Read
    1. Creating the search action
    2. Writing to text boxes
    3. Clicking buttons
    4. The Wait stage
      1. Always use a Wait stage whenever the screen changes
    5. The Read stage
      1. Reading the search results
    6. Using dynamic match attributes
    7. Actions have inputs and outputs too
    8. Try it yourself – clicking Add to Cart
    9. Putting it all together
    10. Summary
  13. Working with Excel
    1. Reading the shopping list from Microsoft Excel
    2. Importing the Excel VBO
    3. Using MS Excel VBO to open, show, and close Microsoft Excel
      1. Before we begin
      2. Opening Excel
      3. Closing Excel
    4. What is the MS Excel VBO made up of?
      1. What is Microsoft Excel VBA?
    5. Opening an Excel file
    6. Reading an entire worksheet into a collection
    7. Writing to a cell
    8. Considerations for comma separated values (CSV)
      1. Converting a collection to CSV
      2. Converting a CSV to a collection
      3. Using the MS Excel VBO with CSV files
    9. Summary
  14. Sending and Receiving Emails
    1. Using the MS Outlook VBO to manage emails
      1. Sending emails
      2. Formatting emails
      3. Sending attachments
    2. Receiving emails
      1. Basic
      2. Advanced
      3. Expert
    3. Summary
  15. Control Room and Work Queues
    1. Introducing the control room
      1. Publishing a process to the control room
      2. Running a process in the control room manually
      3. Scheduling processes
    2. What are work queues?
      1. Creating a work queue
      2. Adding items to the queue
      3. Getting the next item in the queue
      4. Checking for more items in the queue
      5. Marking the item as complete
      6. Updating the status
      7. Marking the item as an exception
      8. Tagging the item
      9. Filtering items
    3. Summary
  16. Exception Handling
    1. Expected and unexpected exceptions
    2. Raising exceptions
    3. Handling exceptions
      1. The recover stage
      2. The resume stage
      3. Using the recover and resume stages to gracefully handle exceptions
      4. Using blocks to group stages that share a common error handling routine
      5. Handling unexpected errors
    4. Debugging and troubleshooting from the control room
      1. Recap – running the process from the control room
      2. Log viewer
        1. Controlling what gets logged
        2. Searching for errors
        3. Exporting to Excel
    5. Summary
  17. Other Books You May Enjoy
    1. Leave a review - let other readers know what you think