Preliminaries

Compared to the rest of the chapters in the book, this one is challenging. This is especially the case for those without a technical background. Thus, when going through this chapter, do not rush things. I would also install the UiPath software and follow along, which will really help to reinforce the concepts.

In this chapter, we will start with the core elements of bot design, such as creating a workflow or flow chart of the functions. We’ll then get to more advanced topics – involving programming – like variables, conditionals, and loops. Finally, we’ll cover some of the basics of debugging.

What if you do not plan to use UiPath? Well, in this case, you should definitely check out the vendor’s educational materials.

But for the most part, they will likely be similar to what is in this chapter. So even scanning some of this chapter can be helpful in getting an understanding of what it takes to create a bot.

Installation of UiPath

There are two main versions of UiPath. There is the Enterprise platform, which requires the payment of a license (based on factors like the number of bots used). However, you can evaluate it for free for up to 60 days.

Then there is the Community edition, which is free. You also get access to support on the forum. So yes, in this chapter, we will highlight this version.

Yet UiPath does have some rules with the Community edition. An individual or a small company (with a limit of five machines) can use the Studio for business purposes. But this is not the case with the Orchestrator. This is only for evaluation and training.

And if the company is considered an enterprise, then both the Studio and Orchestrator will be for evaluation and training purposes.

As for the installation, go to the following: https://www.uipath.com/start-trial. Then select “Try It” for the Community Cloud version and create a login with either your e-mail or Google, Microsoft, or LinkedIn credential. You will then fill out some information, such as your country and company name.

After this, the portal screen will pop up, as seen in Figure 7-1.

A good first step is to click the “Getting Started” button, which will provide a three-minute video on how to use of the core features of UiPath.

Next, I would then install the UiPath Studio (this is where you will create your bots). It is available for a Windows desktop and the download will take a few minutes to complete.

When you launch the application, you will get the following screen (Figure 7-2):

Getting Started

In the initial screen of the UiPath Studio, select “Process.” You’ll see a screen that asks for the name of the process, the directory to put the files in, and the description. As for the name, you cannot use spaces and the convention is to use Pascal case. This means that you will capitalize the first letters of each word. Example: HelloWorld.

Press “Create” and you will get the screen to design the bot (Figure 7-3):

At the top of the screen, there are three menu items. Home brings you back to the initial screen. You can then toggle between the Design and Debug screens.

When you add a package, it will automatically show up in the dependencies. It will also appear on the Activities tab. This is where you can drag and drop functions onto the center of the screen. But first you must select “Open Main Workflow.” By doing this, the middle of the screen will have a canvas that’s called Main and it will be here that you will drag and drop the activities.

OK, let’s first create a basic bot. Go to the Activities tab and select Sequence. You can do this by entering this in the search box above or click Workflow ➤ Control ➤ Sequence. As the name implies, the Sequence is a placeholder for other activities.

Select this and drag it to the Main screen. Next, you will drag the Message Box activity onto the Sequence (it is located at System ➤ Dialog ➤ Message Box). Where it says “Text must be quoted,” you will enter the following: “Hello World!” (make sure this is surrounded in quotes). Here it is in Figure 7-4:

To run this, either click the run button on the menu at the top or press F5.

That’s it! You’ve created your first bot! Granted, it is very simple. But this does provide a general look at the workflow.

With the sequence, you can drag and drop other activities on it. Or, you can insert them by pressing the + button. When you do this, a special menu will appear that will allow you to select the activity, as seen in Figure 7-5. There will be a search box and a list of activities filtered by whether they are your favorites, been used recently, and so on.

On the Sequence, you can click the top of the box and you can then rename it. This can be extremely helpful in making your workflows more understandable.

And you can click the icon on the top right to collapse the box. Again, this can be useful when getting a sense of the organization (the activities can get quite busy!). At the top right of the Main screen, you can also select Expand All or Collapse All. Then at the bottom left, there are other helpful buttons to manage your screen (Fit to Screen, Overview, and Zoom).

Another good feature is Properties. By clicking the Sequence or an activity, you will see the box on the right side of the screen that shows the details about the configuration. For example, with the Message Box, you can change the text, the name of the box, the type of button, etc.

Figure 7-6 highlights all this:

Activities

When creating bots, you will spend much time in the Design part of the UiPath Studio and work quite a bit with the Activities . Some of these will involve simple drag and drops with a little configuration. But others will be more involved and intricate.

Flowcharts and Sequences

It’s recommended to start the creation of a bot with the flowchart or a sequence. The reason? Both are a great way to provide a structure and visualization, which will go from the top of the screen to the bottom.

Since we’ve already taken a look at Sequences, let’s now see how the flowchart activity works. Go to the Activities tab and go to Workflow ➤ Flowchart ➤ Flowchart and then drag and drop it onto the Main screen and click it. You will then see Figure 7-7:

Then, as like we’ve seen with the Sequence, you can drag and drop activities onto the Flowchart.

But they will not run automatically; rather, you will need to create the types of relationships between the activities.

Now let’s connect them. First, right click the Open Browser activity and select “Set As Start Node.” By doing this, UiPath Studio puts an arrow from the Start to the Open Browser activity.

Or you can hover over the Start button and you’ll see four small boxes on every edge of the button. You can then drag one of these to the Open Browser (or any activity) and the arrow will show up and make the connection. As you will see when in UiPath, there are often several ways of doing the same thing.

Next, drag the bottom box on the Open Browser Activity and connect the arrow to the Go Home activity.

This is what you will have (Figure 7-8):

If you select Start or F5, you will get an error, which says “The workflow has validation errors. Review and resolve them first.” In fact, UiPath Studio already provided a warning, with the “!” point on the top-right of Open Browser activity.

The problem? If you click the !, it will say that you need to provide a URL. So put in something like “www.google.com” and then start the bot.

From here, you can actually put in sequences or even more flowcharts! In other words, UiPath is highly flexible. But it is important to try to not get too convoluted with the workflows.

Log Message

As a bot gets more advanced, you want to take steps to document the workflow. One approach with UiPath Studio is to use the Log Message activity (it’s at Programming ➤ Debut ➤ Log Message). Drag and drop this onto a flowchart or sequence and then enter a comment. You will also indicate the type or log level: Fatal, Error, Warn, Info, and Trace.

When you run the bot, the Log Messages will not show up on your Main screen. Instead, they will appear on the Output screen at the bottom and will be included in the UiPath Orchestrator. There will also be an indication at the top as to the log level (see Figure 7-9):

Variables

To use RPA, you need to have a good understanding of variables. They are containers – which you give a name – that hold data, such as text and numbers.

To create a variable in UiPath Studio, you will click the Variables tab, which is at the bottom of the Main screen. Select “Create variable” and then enter a name. There should not be any spaces and it’s recommended to use Pascal case.

Then what does Scope mean? It describes in which part of the workflow you can use the variable. To understand this, let’s take an example. Suppose you have a bot that has a Sequence that includes two activities: an Input Dialog and Log Message activity. You also have a string variable called FirstName that you set for the scope of Sequence. This means you can use it anywhere in the Sequence, including the two activities. However, if you set the scope to the Input Dialog, the variable will not be available in the Sequence.

Why do this? It’s really about better management of your coding. If you have extensive scope for many of your variables, it can be tough to keep track of things and debug the code. The general rule of thumb is to keep scope as narrow as possible.

What’s more, you can set a default value for the variable. And if you do not do so, it will be set to null.

Here’s what the Variables tab looks like for our FirstName Variable (in Figure 7-10):

In some cases, you may have a large number of variables. To help navigate this, you can click the top of the column to sort them (by name, variable type, and scope). If you want to delete a variable, click the row and just press Delete. By highlighting a row, you can also create an annotation, which is a description for the variable. This can be helpful when working with a group of people so everyone understands the purpose for each of the variables.

Oh, and there is another way to create a variable. Click a Sequence, Flowchart or activity and press the right mouse button. Then choose Create Variable.

When working with variables in UiPath, there is a useful activity called Assign, which can both create and manipulate variables within the Main screen workflow. To see, let’s take an example. Drag and drop a Sequence and place the Assign activity in it (Workflow ➤ Control Flow ➤ Assign). In the “To” box, right-click inside and select “Create Variable.” Select this and enter “FirstName” and in the “Enter a VB expression,” enter “Tom.”

Then click the “Variables” tab at the bottom of Main and you will see the FirstName variable show up. Select “String” for the “Variable type.”

Next, drag and drop a Log Message activity on the Sequence (Programming ➤ Debug ➤ Log Message) and chose “Info” for the Log level and type out “The first name is “ + FirstName.

Press the Start button or F5 and the message will pop up in the Output box, which will refer to the FirstName variable, as seen in Figure 7-11:

Loops and Conditionals

Loops are a core part of computer programming languages. It is a way to repeat a set of instructions – say, to search for something and add numbers – until a condition is met.

Then there are conditionals, which are pathways for the underlying logic of computer code. Even with fairly simple constructs, it is possible to create intricate applications.

In the next few sections , we’ll take a look at For Each and Do While/While loops as well as the If/Then/Else and Switch conditionals.

For Each Loop

The For Each loop will cycle through a set of data, such as arrays, lists, database tables, and files. To see how this works, you will first drag and drop a Sequence on the Main screen and then put a For Each activity on it (this will be at Workflow ➤ Control ➤ For Each). This is what you will see (Figure 7-12):

Thus, this will loop through each of the items in the data that is specified in the right box at the top (where it says “Enter a VB expression”). Each time this happens, the instructions in the Body will be executed. Click the For Each box and take a look at the Properties on the right. In the TypeArgument area, you can choose the type of data you want to cycle through.

Item is a variable that stores each of the names as the loop is repeated.

Press the Start button or F5 and you will see the following in Figure 7-13:

As you can see in the Output box below, the For Each loop prints out all the names.

Do While Loop and While Loop

A Do While Loop will continue until a condition is triggered. Unlike a For Each loop, you do not know how many times it will cycle through or if it will even need to do so.

Here’s an example. Drag and drop a Sequence on the Main screen and put the Do While Loop activity inside it (at Workflow ➤ Control ➤ Do While). In the Body, drag and drop the Assign activity (at Workflow ➤ Control ➤ Assign).

Next, go to the bottom of Main and select Variables and click Create variable. From here, enter the “Counter” for the “Name” and chose int32 for the Variable type. We do this since we want to track the value of Counter as it goes through the loop.

Then go to where it says “To” and enter “Counter” and where it says “Enter a VB expression,” you will enter “Counter + 1.” In other words, every time there is a loop, the value of one will be added to Counter.

Figure 7-14 shows what this all looks like after you press Start or F5:

As you can see, the Do While loop counts the numbers until it reaches 10. After this, the loop is terminated.

Then how is the While Loop different? It’s essentially the same thing but the condition is at the top of the sequence. This means that the loop may not necessarily be executed. Thus, in our example, this would be the case if the value of Counter is 11 when the While loop is executed.

IF/THEN/ELSE Conditionals

Yes, this is self-explanatory. You can also use the IF/THEN/ELSE approach with bots.

Here’s how. First you will drag and drop a Sequence and then create a variable called “InputNumber,” which will be an int32. Then you will put an Input Dialog activity inside the Sequence (at System ➤ Dialog ➤ Input Dialog). In the Title, enter “Number Box” and in Label put “Enter a number.”

Press the Start button or F5 and this is what you will get (Figure 7-15) if you enter 5. That is, the Output screen will show “The number entered is 10 or less.”

Switch

While the If activity is quite useful, there are certainly drawbacks. Perhaps the biggest is when you have multiple possible pathways – say, more than three. Using the If activity is usually too cumbersome.

But there is an alternative: the Switch statement .

To see how this works, let’s go through an example. Create a variable called ChatInput and you will classify it as a String.

Next, you will drag and drop the Switch activity on the Sequence (Workflow ➤ Control ➤ Switch).

Click the Switch box and then change the TypeArgument on the Properties box to String. In Expression, enter “ChatInput.” This means that after the user enters text in the Input Dialog, it will be evaluated.

OK, in this chatbot app we are creating, it can only understand three words: Help, Hello, and Purchase! These will be put in separate case statements.

For example, you will click “Add a new case” and then enter Help (note that you do not use quotes). You do this also for Hello and Purchase.

Press Start or F5 and if you enter Hello, you will see “Hi, how are you doing?” in the Output box (see Figure 7-16).

Debug

Coding a bot can be fairly quick. What really takes time? It’s usually the debugging. In some cases, it can take quite a while. According to the late computer scientist Alan Jay Perlis: “There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.”¹

The good news is that RPA systems like UiPath have extensive documentation and helpful forums. A quick search on Google can also provide some links to solutions.

As noted earlier in the chapter, the UiPath platform has a Debug section, which you click on the top of the screen. This provides an array of tools that should help fix problems with the bot.

One is to create more detailed log files, which show the instructions executed, values impacted, and time stamps. This can help pinpoint the nagging issues. To allow for this, you will click the Log Activities. Then you will run the bot by either clicking on the Debug File button or pressing F9. After this, you can find the log file by clicking on Open Logs.

You’ll notice that this process can be quick. So by clicking the Pick Slow Step icon and selecting Highlight Activities, the speed will be much more reasonable and you will also see each element highlighted (by the color yellow).

The UiPath Debug system has the ability to set Breakpoints within the workflow. You can do this where you think there may be a problem or before where the bot triggers an error.

Once you reach the Breakpoint, you have a couple options. One is to click the Locals tab, which will show you the contents of the variables. This will indicate if the bot is taking the right actions with the data.

Also, at a Breakpoint, you can then press the Step Into button. This will execute the next step in the workflow – and you can then see how things change. By doing this, you should get a sense of what is happening and where the problems are. Or you can click the Step Over button, which will take you to the next activity.

Another way of debugging a bot is to use exception handling – that is, with the Try/Catch construct. To see how it works, let’s first try by dragging and dropping a Sequence (Workflow ➤ Control ➤ Sequence) onto the Main screen and then putting a Message Box (System ➤ Dialog ➤ Message Box) on it. You will then enter the following in Message: “Hello, World!” But do not put in the quotes.

When you press the Start button or F5, you will get an error and the bot will stop. But what if you do not want this happen? Suppose you instead want the bot to continue but only provide you with a warning?

This is where Try/Catch comes in. Drag and drop this onto the Main screen (Workflow ➤ Error Handling ➤ Try Catch). You will then right click the top of the Log Message box and select Cut. Then go to Try and paste it inside .

You will now have this (as seen in Figure 7-17):

You will then click “Add new catch” and then select System.Exception, which is a generic option. Next, click to the right side and drag and drop a Log Message inside. Select Warn for the Log level and enter this for the Message: “An error has been detected.” And make sure to include the quotes.

When you launch this bot, the first Log Message will be triggered (the “try”). But since it has an error , the code will execute the second Log Message (the “catch”). In other words, by doing this, the program will continue to run – but you will still be able to track the potential problems.

Common UiPath Functions

We have looked at the different types of workflows and programming structures for UiPath. But as you create bots, you will encounter certain types of scenarios like logins and screen scraping. These are at the core of RPA functionality.

So let’s start with a login. Actually, UiPath has provided a test environment – called Acme System 1 – to help with this, which is at https://acme-test.uipath.com/account/login. It essentially emulates a company, such as with accounts for vendors, checks, and invoices. For the most part, you can fairly easily test the numerous functions of UiPath.

To use Acme System 1, press Register and enter your e-mail and password. Next, we will create a bot to login. To do this, you must have the Microsoft Edge extension installed, which you can access from the Tools menu item on the start screen of the UiPath Studio. You will then press Launch and Turn On after it is downloaded.

Go to create a bot by dragging and dropping a Sequence on the Main screen (Workflow ➤ Control ➤ Sequence). Then go to the Record at the top and select “Web.” As the name implies, this will record your actions on a web site, which will be Acme System 1. After you are done, press to stop the Record and your Sequences will have the workflows for the login. As you use UiPath – or any other RPA system – the recording of actions will be quite common.

But there also must be ways to help customize this. After all, what if someone else is logging into the system? In this case, you want to allow UiPath to make the adjustment – which is done by using Arguments. This is available at the bottom Tab on the Main screen. You will specify the name of the argument – say, the username or password – and then indicate the type and default value.

Another common function of RPA is Screen Scraping. UiPath Studio actually makes it fairly easy to do this. You will select “Screen Scraping” at the top of the screen and then go to a web page that has information. For example, it may be a table of data and UiPath will automatically detect this. It will then ask if you want to scrape all of it. It will also see if the data spans multiple pages and UiPath will handle this, such as put it in a Data Table. This makes it easy to manipulate within the bot with Excel or another application.

The UiPath Orchestrator

So far in this chapter, we have covered the UiPath Studio. But once you have finished creating a bot, you will need to manage it. This is done by using the UiPath Orchestrator.

In terms of deployment, you can either have this software on your own servers or the cloud (at cloud.uipath.com). Regardless of which option you choose, you can have separate instances of the software. For example, you could have ones for development, staging, and production, which should help simplify the bot development process. Or you could have instances for different departments, say, for human resources, finance, and marketing.

In this chapter, we will look at the cloud version. So log in and you will be taken to the portal screen. Next, click Service that is at the bottom of the screen – which will take you to the Orchestrator (see Figure 7-18):

First go to the top right of the page and click your user icon and then select Settings. In the general tab, you can choose your time zone. If you belong to a global organization, you might want to set this for “(UTC) Coordinated Universal Time.” In the other parts of the Settings section, you can integrate with your e-mail system, find the details of the deployment URLs and provide for security.

To see how all this works, here’s an example. We’ll start with a simple bot that pops up a message with “Hello, world!” (we created this earlier in the chapter).

We’ll then look at how to connect the bot to the cloud. First, go to the main screen and select Machines and press +. You will get three icons: “Standard Machine,” “Machine Template,” and “Close.” We’ll use the first one (which, by the way, is the most common one to use).

Before doing this, you need to locate the ID of your computer. To do this, bring up the Windows Explorer (which shows the files on your Windows system) and right-click “This PC.” You will find your machine ID at “Computer Name:” or “Device Name:” You will then enter this when you select “Standard Machine” and click “PROVISION.”

You will then want to get another piece of information: the machine key. You will find this by pressing the “…” (which are vertical).

Now click “ROBOTS” at the right side of the screen, click +, and you will see three icons: “Standard Robot,” “Floating Robot,” and “Close.” Choose the first one and select the computer name from the dropdown. Then enter “Hello” as the name for the bot and then the login credentials for your Windows machine.

UiPath will update the screen to show the robot but also indicate that it is disconnected. To make the connection, you will need to launch the UiPath Robot application, which you can find on your Windows Start menu. At the top, click the settings icon and enter the machine ID and then put https://platform.uipath.com for the Orchestrator URL. This will then activate the bot.

Best Practices for Bot Development

Conclusion

Even though we covered lots of ground in this chapter, we still only looked at the beginner level of UiPath! The software is definitely powerful and allows for deep usage of an IT environment. Although, with what we have looked at in this chapter, you would still be able put together some useful automations.

Next we’ll look at deployment and monitoring.

Key Takeaways