Using UI Automation for browser interactions

UI Automation Cloud capabilities offer powerful and comprehensive features designed to enhance productivity by building browser-based cross-platform automation which enables you to automate repetitive tasks, reduce manual input errors, and improve overall efficiency.

UI Automation Cloud offers an extensive range of capabilities that simulate human behavior (for instance, clicking screen elements, typing text, data scraping, or screen scraping) when interacting with web applications.

To implement end-to-end business scenarios, these capabilities can be integrated with other API-based activity packages, such as Microsoft 365 or Integration Service activity packages, enabling seamless data transfer and real-time synchronization between them.

You can troubleshoot UI-based automations by quickly understanding the cause of the errors when viewing the executions via the Live Streaming and the robot Recording capabilities.

Also, UI Automation Cloud capabilities offer an out-of-the-box solution to automate the nFactor authentication for web business applications, which helps build automation implying multiple authentication Factors that are chained together. For more details, see UI Automation Browser Connection.

Supported browsers for UI Automation

• Design time - You can design automations with UI Automation activities in Studio Web from Google Chrome (Windows and macOS) or Microsoft Edge (Windows).

  Studio Web and the target web apps must be rendered in the same browser (Chrome or Edge) and the UiPath^® extension must be installed for the browser.

• Run time - Automations built with UI Automation and Studio Web run by default on serverless robots in the UiPath Cloud in Chrome. With the help of UiPath Orchestrator, they can be configured to run unattended using Chrome on Windows, macOS, and Automation Cloud robots where the Chrome browser and the UiPath extension for Chrome are installed.

Use cases

Here are some of the most common use cases for UI Automation with Studio Web.

Automate business scenarios

• Customer service automation

  Automating responses to common customer inquiries: get inquiries data from Outlook, upload it into business applications, and generate automatic responses.

• Accounting automation

  Create expense reports, automatically categorizing expenses and transactions to streamline bookkeeping processes.

• Order processing

  Automate order fulfillment processes with SAP Fiori, including order entry, invoicing, and shipping.

• Employee onboarding

  Use automated workflows to streamline the hiring process and onboard new employees in Workday.

Web scraping

• Customer feedback analysis

  Analyze customer reviews and feedback about your products and services on various review sites and social media web platforms. Use the UI Automation web scraping capabilities to gather data in real time and analyze it to improve your products or services.

• Price comparison

  Compare prices of products from various e-commerce websites. Use web scraping tools to extract pricing data from multiple sources and aggregate it for further comparison.

• Lead generation

  Generate leads by collecting contact information, such as email addresses and phone numbers, from various websites. Use the UI Automation web scraping capabilities to automate lead generation and save time and effort.

• Product review scraping

  Scrape product reviews for e-commerce websites from different sources to get insights into product quality, customer satisfaction, and potential issues. Use web scraping tools to gather reviews and analyze them to improve their products or services.

Automated testing

UI Automation can perform automated testing on user interfaces and ensure that they function properly under different scenarios.

Activities

The UI Automation activities are really easy to use, even if you have no previous experience in automation. These activities offer drag-and-drop interfaces, allowing you to perform point-and-click interaction to quickly build automation.

Multiple UI Automation activities available in Studio Web, including:

• Use Browser
• Check App State
• Check Element
• Check/Uncheck
• Click
• Extract Table Data
• Get Attribute
• Get Text
• Get URL
• Go To URL
• Highlight
• Hover
• Keyboard Shortcuts
• Mouse Scroll
• Navigate Browser
• Select Item
• Take Screenshot
• Type Into

Example of using UI Automation

To exemplify how to use UI automation activities to interact with your web browser, we will create an automation that extracts table data from a web page, writes the data in an Excel workbook in Microsoft 365, and then sends the workbook via email. You can create a similar automation for Google Sheets by using Google Workspace activities. We will use the following activities:

• Use Browser to indicate the web page from which to extract the data.
• Extract Table Data to perform the table extraction.
• Create Workbook to create the workbook in Microsoft 365.
• Write Range to write the extracted data to the workbook.

1. Navigate to the Sales Opportunities sample page in your browser.
2. In a separate tab, create a new Studio Web project. For the trigger, select Manual automation.
3. Add a Use Browser activity after Manual Trigger. In the activity, from the Work in scope dropdown, select Sales opportunities to indicate the web page to automate.
4. In the body of the Use Browser activity, add an Extract Table Data activity. In the activity, select Indicate target on screen. The Sales Opportunities page is brought into focus and the Table Selection dialog is displayed.
   1. In the dialog, select Select Data to Extract, and then move the mouse over one of the cells in the table.
   2. When the cell is highlighted in green, click it. The table is detected and a dialog is displayed prompting you to select the entire table.
   3. Select Yes. The Table Extraction dialog displays the columns detected in the table.

   4. This is where we can remove columns we don't need. For example, we can select the Delete button next to the first column (Column-0) to remove it, and then select Save and close.

5. We return to the project where the Extract Table Data activity is now configured. A variable has been automatically generated for the data table output. Because the activity is added inside a Use Browser scope activity, the automatically generated variable is available only in the scope activity, so we will manually create a DataTable variable so that we can use the output in activities placed outside of Use Browser:
   1. Under Show additional options > Others, select See more > Create variable next to Destination data table.
   2. Enter a variable name without spaces, for example ExtractedData, leave the other options unchanged, and then click Create.

      The variable is created and available in the Data Manager.

6. Add a Microsoft 365 Create Workbook activity after Extract Data Table, outside of the Use Browser body. This activity creates a new workbook where we will copy the table data. In the activity:
   1. Create or select a connection.
   2. Select the Folder where to create the workbook.
   3. Enter the Workbook name, for example ExtractedSalesOpportunities.
7. Add a Microsoft 365 Write Range activity after Create Workbook. This activity writes the table data to the new workbook. In the activity:
   1. Create or select a connection.
   2. In the Workbook field, select See more > Use variable. This allows us to select the output of the Create workbook activity to indicate the file to use.
   3. In the Workbook field, select Click to use a variable , and then select Create Workbook > New workbook.
   4. In the Range field, enter a name for the sheet where to write in the workbook, for example SalesOpportunities.
   5. In the What to write field, select Click to use a variable , and then select Variables > ExtractedData. This indicates that the data to write is the ExtractedData variable where we saved the output of the Extract Table Data activity.
8. Add a Microsoft 365 Download file activity after Write Range. This activity retrieves the workbook file so that we can then send it via email. In the activity:
   1. Create or select a connection.
   2. Next to File to download, select See more > Use variable. This allows us to select the output of the Create Workbook activity to indicate the file to use.
   3. Select Click to use a variable , and then select Create Workbook > New workbook.
9. Add a Microsoft 365 Send Email activity after Download File. This activity sends the workbook file via email. In the activity:
   1. Create or select a connection.
   2. In the To, field, enter an email address, for example your address.
   3. In the Subject, field, enter a subject, for example Extracted Sales Opportunities Data.
   4. In the Body, field, enter a message.
   5. In the Attachment(s) field, select Click to use a variable , and then select Download file > Downloaded file.
10. Click Run at the top of the page to test the automation.

Tip: You can use the Table Data Extraction for Sales Opportunities to Excel workbook or Table Data Extraction for Sales Opportunities to Google Sheets template to build this project.