UiPath Studio Guide | Introduction To UiPath

Robotic Process Automation is gaining recognition on a daily basis and the reason behind its success lies in the hands of its tools. With the increase in adoption of these tools, organizations are hunting for professionals with RPA certification]. So, in this article on UiPath Studio, I will provide you with a comprehensive knowledge of UiPath.

The following topics are covered in this article:

Introduction To RPA

To understand RPA, you have to first understand three terms: Robotic, Process and _Automation. _Let me explain you each of these terms one by one.

• Robotic:  Entities which mimic human actions are called Robots.
• Process:  Sequence of steps which lead to a meaningful activity.
• Automation:  Any process which is done by a robot without human intervention.

Now, if we summarize all the terms together then, mimicking human actions to perform a sequence of steps that will lead to meaningful activity, without any human intervention is known as Robotic Process Automation.

Since, in the world of RPA, physical robots do not work, you need software to cater to your requirements. Those softwares are nothing but the RPA Tools.

Numerous amounts of tools are available in the market, with each having their own advantages and disadvantages. But, the top 3 tools present in today’s market are the trio(UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere).

Now, if you wish to know more about RPA Tools and understand which tool will cater your need best, you can refer to my article on RPA Tools. Since this article is on UiPath Studio, let me take you through UiPath Studio.

UiPath Studio is one of the products offered by UiPath. It is a dashboard, where you can create your automation workflow with the help of activities and execute the designed automation.

The following are the features of UiPath Studio:

GUI Dashboard  – Offers a  GUI dashboard which consists of pre-defined activities to build automation workflows.

Complexity Levels  –  Allows you to create projects based on complexity levels such as Sequence, Flowchart and State Machine.

Types of Recorders  – Offers various types of recorders to record actions on multiple platforms such as Basic, Desktop, Web, Image, and Native Citrix.

Logging & Exception Handling  – Allows you to perform debugging and exception handling  If you wish to learn how to use these options you can refer to my article on Error Handling.

Integrate with OCR technologies  – UiPath Studio can integrate with various OCR technologies to perform screen scraping.

Reusable Components  – With the UiPath Studio, you can create reusable components to publish them together as Libraries.

Now, that you know, what is UiPath Studio, next in this article, I will show you the installation steps of UiPath Studio.

Install UiPath Studio
Step 1: Go to the link: https://www.uipath.com/freetrial-or-community and click on Get Community Edition. Refer below.

Step 2: Then, fill in the required details and accept the License Agreement. After that, click on “ Request Community Edition ”. Refer below.

Step 3: Now, open your registered email to get the instructions to download UiPath. Refer below.

Step 4: Double click on the link present in the above email to download the file.

Step 5: Once, the file is downloaded, double click on the file to initialize the setup.

Step 6:  Enter the registered email address in the dialog box that opens and clicks on the Activate button.

Step 7:  Once installed, you will be redirected to the acknowledgment page stating that you have successfully installed.

Now, once you open UiPath Studio, the following is the screen that you would see.

So, that’s how you can install UiPath. Next, in this article, let us look into the different types of projects in UiPath.

There are mainly 5 types of Projects in UiPath Studio. Let's discuss in detail:

Process

A process   is a clean slate, you can build your projects from scratch over here. Below screenshot is the screen of a blank project. It has no templates or nothing predefined on your workspace. 

Library

The library is used to create reusable components and publish them together as a Library. Apart from this, Libraries can be added as dependencies to automation processes.

Transactional Process

The transactional process is used to model an automation workflow in the form of a flowchart as you can see below.

Agent Process Improvement

Agent Process Improvement   assists the user by automating the tasks. It is used to assess any user working on the system. So, whenever you want to define your own shortcuts, you can use this project as you can see below.

Robotic Enterprise Framework

Robotic Enterprise Framework   is used to define states in a project, which are useful in large scale deployment processes. Refer to the snapshot below.

NOTE: To create a project, you have to double click on the type of project you wish to, and mention the name, location and description of the project.

Now, that you know the different types of project, next in this article let us look into the components of UiPath Studio.

So, let us discuss each one of them one by one.

Ribbon Tab

The Ribbon Tab consists of mainly three tabs (Start, Design and Execute) and each of these has various options to perform different tasks. So, let’s discuss each one of them one by one.

The Start section of Ribbon Tab

When you click on the Start option on the Ribbon tab, you will be redirected to the screen which has options of various projects and the recent projects. Refer below.

The Design section of Ribbon Tab

The Design section of the Ribbon tab provides you with the below options:

• New: This option is used to create either a new Sequence, Flowchart or a State machine.
• Save: This option is used to save the existing file or automation workflow.
• Save as Template: You can use this option to save the current file or the automation workflow as a Template.
• Run: The Run option is used to execute the designed automation workflow.
• Manage Packages: This section is used to view the project dependencies and also install the required packages for your project.
• Recording: This option allows users to record UI mouse movements and keyboard activities to generate automation scripts.
• Screen Scraping: The Screen Scraping wizard is used to scrape data from an application of a specific screen.
• Data Scraping: The Data Scraping wizard is used to scrape data and store it in an Excel file.
• User Events: You can use this option to capture mouse or keyboard events.
• Remove Unused Variables: With the help of this option, you can remove all the unused variables from the workflow
• Export To Excel: This option is used to export the automation workflow to an excel file.
• Publish: You can use this option to publish the designed automation/project to the Orchestrator server. With the help of this, you can use the project to automate humongous amounts of the front office and back office processes.

Now, let us move forward with this article, and look into the next tab of Ribbon i.e. the Execute Tab.

The Execute section of Ribbon Tab

The Execute tab provides you with the following options:

• Run: The Run option is used to execute the designed automation workflow.
• Stop: The Stop option is used to stop the execution of your project.
• Debug: This option is used to start debugging the project to see the execution of every activity.
• Step Into & Step Over: These options are used to check the step by step execution of the complete automation workflow.
• Validate: The Validate option is used to validate your project.
• Breakpoints: The Breakpoints option is used to define breakpoints while debugging the project.
• Slow Step: This option is used to reduce the speed of execution
• Options: This option offers various highlighting options to highlight activities based on your requirement.
• Open Logs: The Open Logs option is used to various highlighting options

So, this was about the Ribbon Tab. Now, let us move forward and look into the next pane i.e. Activity Pane.

Activity Pane

The Activity Pane consists of various activities which you can drag and drop into the workspace. The activities offered by UiPath are segregated as you can refer below.

The configuration of all the activities is set in the properties pane. So, when you design an automation, you have to drag and drop activities. Now, you can configure the properties of these activities individually to ensure the automation workflow works. 

As the name suggests, output pane is used to check the output of the running automation workflow.

Now, that I told you the different components of UiPath Studio, let us implement these concepts in the UiPath. 

Hands-On

Problem Statement: Let’s create a simple project to find out whether a number is even or odd.

Solution:

Step 1: Open your UiPath Studio and click on the “Process” project.

Step 2: Mention the name, path and description of the project and click on Create.

Step 3: Once you have created the project, drag and drop a Sequence in your workspace. Refer below.

Step 4: Now, drag and drop an Input Dialog activity into the sequence. In the Title and the Label section of this activity mention the text as you can see below:

• Title: “Mention Number”
• Label: “Enter the number”

Step 5: Now, go to the Properties Pane of this activity and mention a variable in the Output section. To mention a variable, press on CTRL + K and mention the variable name. After that click on Enter. Here I will mention as number1. 

Step 6: Now, go to the Variable Manager and mention the datatype of the variable to be Int32. Refer below.

Step 7: Next, you have to drag an If loop to mention the condition. So, drag and drop the If activity into your workspace and mention the _ condition: number1 mod 2 = 0 _ in the condition section of the activity. Refer below.

Step 8: Now, in the Then section and Else section of the If activity drag and drop a Message Box activity to display whether the number is even or odd. In the Message Box present in the Then section, mention the Text “Number is Even”. Similarly, in the Message Box present in the Else section, mention the Text “Number is Odd”. Refer below.

Step 9: Now, save your task and execute it by clicking on the Run button.

Step 10: Once, the task starts executing, you will see an Input Dialog in which you have to enter and then click on Ok. Refer below.

Step 11: Since we entered an odd number you will see the output as below.

So, guys, this was all about the components of UiPath Studio. With this, we come to the end of this article on UiPath Studio. I hope you enjoyed reading this article and learned the different components of UiPath Studio.

Got a question for us? Please mention it in the comments section of this  UiPath Studio  article and we will get back to you.