UI Automation

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to use the Automate Recorder. Create interactive tasks without having to know which actions in the Task Builder need to be used—the Recorder creates them for you. In this video you’ll learn:

• How to build desktop automation with the Recorder
• An overview of the Recorder panel including the control and position buttons, and adding additional options, like wait or a keyboard input
• See an example of the Recorder in action

Watch this tutorial now to learn how to get started.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to use the Automate Recorder for web browser interactivity. Create interactive tasks without having to know which actions in the Task Builder need to be used—the Recorder creates them for you. In this video you’ll learn:

• How to build web automation with the Recorder
• An overview of the Recorder panel including the control, position, and web buttons, and adding additional actions, like wait or a keyboard input
• How to add non-GUI steps to your recording
• See a few examples of the Recorder in action

Watch this tutorial now to learn how to get started.

Find out how Automate’s web browser actions can automate website interactions like opening web browsers, navigating to websites, extracting data, and more. In each part of this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use Automate’s web browser actions in real-life use cases:

• Part 1: Search Google News for Negative References
• Part 2: Search Amazon & Save Top 5 Results to Excel

Watch both parts to learn more about web browser automation.

Learn how to develop automated interactivity workflows by creating a task that uses the Interactivity and Input Actions to write to a data entry application. Automation expert Pat Cameron gives you a guided tutorial on setting up an interactivity report task in Automate. In this video you’ll learn how to:

• Add variables and format the text
• Capture the attributes of an object with Automate
• Use the different options in the Input Action such as send keystrokes, move mouse, and block input

Watch this tutorial now to learn more.

Learn how to use web browser actions to input your username and password credentials to login to a website. Automation expert Brigette Matz gives you a guided tutorial on setting up a website login task. In this video you’ll learn how to:

• Locate the web browser actions
• Use the Open and Create Session actions to automatically open a web browser and start a new session
• Use the Set Value and Click actions to automate inputting a value into a web browser and clicking on buttons 

Watch this tutorial now to learn how to get started.

Learn how to use web browser actions to extract data from a website and write it to a file. Automation expert Brigette Matz gives you a guided tutorial through the Automate actions needed to extract a dataset from a web browser and write it to a CSV file. In this video you’ll learn how to:

• Use the Create Session, Extract Table, Get Value, and Write to File Actions to set up a task that automatically grabs data from a website
• Extract web browser data to a dataset and write the dataset to a CSV file

Watch this tutorial now to learn how to get started.

When automating an application that has a web browser as a user interface, it can sometimes take some trial and error to find the right actions to use. Automation expert Pat Cameron shares the best practices to use when creating web browser automation tasks. In this video you’ll learn:

• How to visit a web browser and determine the best actions to use for your task
• The most commonly used actions for web browser automation:
  • Web Browser Action: automate the opening, navigating in, or closing of a browser
  • Interactivity Action: replicate moving a mouse to objects to click links and buttons
  • Input Action: send keystrokes and function keys, as well as clicking links and buttons
  • Window Action: controls windows including opening, closing, and moving windows
  • Wait Action: waits for the occurrence of a specific event or occurrence before continuing with a task

Watch this tutorial now to learn how to get started.

Download Training Materials

Overview:

This example introduces you to the Automate Recorder and Excel actions. In this exercise you will read measurement data from the Excel worksheet into a dataset and then open a web page that contains a conversion utility to enter in the dataset values and extract the corresponding converted values, writing them back into the Excel worksheet. After completing this exercise, you will have learned to:

• Utilize the Automate Recorder to interact with web elements.
• Utilize the Excel actions to read data into a dataset.
• Utilize conditional logic to loop through the dataset.
• Write data into an existing excel document.

General Instructions:

Using the Automate Recorder, open a web browser to a measurement conversion website. Use Automate to select the “From” measurement found in the Excel document and set the “From” value on the website. Use the Automate Recorder to then select the “To” measurement and get the converted “To” value writing it back into the worksheet. You will set the initial “From” value on the website to the "Inch" value from the Excel document. Find and extract the conversions for the following measurements: Foot, Yard, Mile.

• Create any required variables to store extracted values.
• Use the Excel Open Workbook and Get Cells actions to open and read the worksheet contents into a dataset.
• Access the Automate Recorder from the Task Builder by clicking on “New Recording”
• Utilize the Web button on the recorder to select the browser you would like to use and input the URL provided.
• Use the Web button on the recorder to set and extract the values.
• Use the Excel Set Cells action to write the extracted values into the worksheet.

Tips:

• After recording the UI actions in the Automate Recorder you can inject business actions (Excel, conditional logic) directly into the recording region as needed.
• Utilize the Expression Builder to work with dataset and variable values.
• The Automate Window actions can be used to maximize browser windows.
• Web Browser actions can also be used in conjunction with the recorder actions, try this out to refresh the page between entries. Remember to update the session name.
• The OpenDocument Spreadsheet actions can be used if you do not have access to Excel.

Use best practices when creating any variable (var_variablename) or datasets (ds_datasetname) so you can easily recognize these objects.