Introduction to UiPath
UiPath is one of the Robotics Process Automation Tool. It is a progressive and leading automation Tool that allows you to automate the various type of processes by designing visually with the help of drag and drop functionality of activities, and the design looks like a Flow chart.
Using UiPath, users can automate business complex processes, Repetitive tasks, Excel Automation, Extracting hundreds of pages of data, etc.
RPA
RPA is nothing but Robotic Process Automation and is a software package, which can be easily designed to automate repetitive, basic tasks across the windows desktop Applications.
Working of UiPath
Programming Knowledge is not required for RPA-UiPath developers as it is a drag and drop activities Tool.
UiPath Architecture
Client Layer: Client Layer is the top layer that contains UiPath Studio and UiPath Robot.
The workflow design can be done in UiPath Studio to automate the process ad Robot can execute the jobs.
UiPath Agent is a service that is used to make the available Jobs visible to the users in a Robot tray. Robot Tray is an Attended mode Robot to Run/Stop the jobs and change the settings accordingly.
UiPath Executor is a type of service that is used to execute the jobs, which are available in the Robot tray of the window Application.
Server Layer: Once the process is designed and Robot is ready to run the Job, the project can be published to Orchestrator.
Features of UiPath
Below are the features:
- UiPath has a drag and drops functionalities to design the process. Users can easily understand the functionalities, as it is user-friendly.
- UiPath has the Orchestrator, which acts, like a Centralized repository and it handles all the robots.
- It provides highly secured login features to Robots.
- UiPath has features like debugging the code and check how the flow is going, Handling Exceptions accordingly.
- Using UiPath, Users can access the “n” number of emails from Outlook for business purpose, extracting the data from PDF, Excel, and other text format files, and you can trim the data, get the specific data from a file easily.
- It has a special data type called Generic Variable, which is used to store any type of data including numbers, dates, Text, and type of data.
Applications of UiPath
UiPath has mainly three products:
1. UiPath Studio
UiPath Studio is a Software package tool that allows you to automate the various type of processes by designing visually with the help of drag and drop functionality of activities and the design looks like a Flow chart.
- Each activity represents a certain type of work to perform.
For Example: clicking the Right & Left button of Mouse, Typing in dialog Box, Etc.
- It allows us to use recorders, drag, and drop widgets to model our robotic processes.
- The studio is the main product of the UiPath. It has many various types of features that can be easily integrated with any kind of language.
- UiPath Studio has two types of profiles available for Developers and Business users
- The studio offers a plethora of tools for designing complex and large workflows;
- StudioX is addressed to business users for automating tasks with the use of integration with Microsoft Excel application. Check out the StudioX guide.
UiPath Studio contains multiple panels for easier access to specific functionalities. They can be docked, act as floating windows, or the Auto-hide option can be enabled from the drop-down list.
UiPath Studio has the following tabs
Home
Create a new Project with pre-defined templates or open a project you recently worked on. You can pin or remove the projects from the recently opened list. Default projects are always saved in “Users\documents\UiPath” Folder.
Design
- We have plenty of options to work around with the Design Tab.
- Add a new sequence, flowchart, or a state machine to your project.
- Install and manage the activity packages as per the need of the project.
- Use UI Explorer to customize the selectors for a specific UI
- Recording: Use Recording option to capture the user’s actions on the screen and translate them into the sequence.
- Using data Scraping/Screen Scraping, users can extract the tabular format data and raw data as well.
Debug
- Debug the workflow by setting breakpoints.
- Monitor the flow execution of activities systematically.
- View the execution details by opening the Logs and can check if any changes are made in the design.
2. UiPath Robot
UiPath robots execute the processes, which are designed in UiPath Studio.
Once the process is designed in UiPath Studio, then UiPath Robot can execute them in Either Attended mode or Unattended Mode.
The robot has two Types:
Attended Robot: Attended Robots work under the control of Humans.
Attended robots can only work on the same machine. The process can be executed using Robot Tray on the same machine by triggering the system-level events. Users cannot have the session while the attended robot is running on the same workstation. Here robots can only execute one job at a time.
Unattended Robot: Unattended Robots can execute the process in multiple workstations without human intervention. Using Orchestrator, you can trigger multiple jobs at once; schedule the tasks with the help of Orchestrator.
Unattended Robot has the capability of an attended robot, remote execution, monitoring, and providing support work for queues.
3. UiPath Orchestrator
UiPath Orchestrator is a Centralized repository, which handles the Robots, Jobs, processes, Queues, Assets, Logs, multiple tenants, packages, machines, and License information.
Robots: Using the Robots tab in Orchestrator, users can manage the robots and can have a check the number of robots is busy, free, disconnected from Orchestrator, and take actions accordingly.
Jobs: Multiple processes (which are published to orchestrator) can be triggered with the help of the Jobs tab.
Here users can see how the job is running with the help of Logs and kill/stop the Job based on the flow.
Queues: Using Queues, Users can divide the transactions among the robots. They can be scheduled based on a certain date and time.
Processes: Process acts like GIT Hub. Once the process is published to Orchestrator, users have to process with the relevant details such as the Project name, environment type, and project description, So that process, can be triggered by any robot any time.
Triggers: Using triggers we can view how many processes are scheduled and the date-time details.
Assets: Using Assets, users can store the secured data such as Credentials of applications, config file paths. So that we don’t have to change multiple times if it’s necessary.
Advantages and Disadvantages
Below are the advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages
Below are the advantages:
- UiPath tool is very easy to use and is easily affordable.
- UiPath is much faster than humans in completing the work and it works in a very effective way for both small and large-scale business processes.
- It reduces human efforts and saves time.
- It provides both attended and unattended Automation.
- UiPath offers Community edition, which is a free trial version for users.
Disadvantages
Below are the disadvantages:
- UiPath is not a comprehensive Computing solution.
- It cannot read any unstructured format data.
- Linux packages are not included in UiPath.
Conclusion
UiPath is a very efficient tool and it is easily understandable. It does not require any programming language. We can automate all small and large-scale business processes. All repetitive tasks can be automated without human intervention.
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