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UI Automation activities

UI Explorer

Cross-platform UI Explorer for indicating UI elements and building and testing selectors in Studio Desktop, as a standalone tool, and in Studio on macOS.

Overview

UI Explorer is a cross-platform tool for indicating UI elements, inspecting their properties, and generating and editing selectors. It replaces the previous Windows-only tool as the default selector authoring experience across all Studio flavors, giving you the same selector inspection and tuning workflow whether you're building Windows, macOS, or cross-platform automations.

UI Explorer offers the same experience in all the places where it is available:

  • Studio Desktop on Windows – for Windows and Cross-platform projects
  • Standalone tool – for inspecting or editing selectors outside of a Studio project
  • Studio on macOS – for macOS target applications (planned for the end of the year)
Note:

The previous Windows-only tool is now referred to as UI Explorer Classic. It remains available in Windows Studio Desktop projects, accessible from the new UI Explorer, so existing workflows are not disrupted.

Core capabilities

UI Explorer lets you:

  • Indicate UI elements, including:
    • Application windows
    • Individual UI elements
  • Generate and display selectors, providing the corresponding Unified Target — the target element and its anchors, together with all their configured targeting methods (Selector, Computer Vision, Image, Semantic Selector) — in JSON format
  • Copy selectors to the clipboard
  • Save selectors to a file
  • Load existing selectors for inspection and editing
  • Load selectors generated by UI Automation activities, including selectors stored in the current XML format

Every UI Automation activity that uses a target element now exposes two additional commands in the Expand target properties context menu, making it easy to move targets between activities and the new UI Explorer:

  • Copy target to clipboard — Copies the entire Unified Target for the activity's target element, so it can be pasted into the new UI Explorer using the Edit Element card.
  • Paste target from clipboard — Pastes a Unified Target for a UI element previously indicated with the new UI Explorer.

Selector format and compatibility

UI Explorer generates and displays selectors in JSON format. For backward compatibility, it can also load selectors that were generated by UI Automation activities and stored in the existing XML format, so you can inspect or edit selectors from older projects without needing UI Explorer Classic.

Accessing UI Explorer

ContextHow to access
Studio Desktop (Windows)Available for both Windows and Cross-platform projects
StandaloneDownload from Automation Cloud or the Customer Portal
Studio (macOS)Planned

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