Text Activities

Text recognition activities are useful in extracting text from UI elements on the screen, as well as extracting coordinates for UI elements relative to text on the screen. There are situations when UI elements cannot be identified through standard means, and the Text automation activities featured in Studio enable you to identify buttons, check boxes and other UI elements based on the text they contain. Text recognition activities share the Occurrence property, that enables the user to specify which instance of the text that is being scraped should be acted upon. For example, if the string that is being searched for appears 4 times on the screen, setting the Occurrence property to 3 selects the third occurrence of the word(s).

Click Text and Hover Text are activities used to click the text inside a UI element or hover over it. After the user interface object and text are specified, the activity searches the UI for the text and clicks it or hovers over it. As input, these activities receive a Target, which can be either a string variable, a Region variable, a UIElement variable or a selector, which indicate the coordinates where the action must be performed. The target can also be automatically generated by using the Indicate on Screen functionality, which tries to identify UI elements in the indicated region, and generates selectors for them. If this does not work for you, then manual intervention might be required.

Find Text Position searches for a given string in a specified target, and returns a UIElement variable which has the clipping region set to the screen position of that string. This activity can be useful in locating UI elements relative to text on the screen when there is no other way of locating them, and using them further in your automation. As input, this activity receives a Target, which can be either a string variable, a Region variable, a UiElement variable or a selector, that helps you identify what you want to automate and where the actions must be performed. The target can also be automatically generated by using the Indicate on Screen functionality, which tries to identify UI elements in the indicated region, and generates selectors for them. If this does not work for you, then manual intervention might be required. The activity outputs the UiElement variable that contains the provided string.

Get Full Text extracts a string and its information from an indicated UI element using the FullText screen scraping method. This activity can also be automatically generated when performing screen scraping, along with a container. This activity can be useful in retrieving text from desktop and web applications. As input, this activity receives a Target, which can be either a Region variable, a UiElement variable or a selector, that helps you identify what you want to automate and where the actions must be performed. The target can also be automatically generated by using the Indicate on Screen functionality, which tries to identify UI elements in the indicated region, and generates selectors for them. If this does not work for you, then manual intervention might be required. The activity outputs a string variable that contains the extracted text.

Get Visible Text extracts a string and its information from an indicated UI element using the Native screen scraping method. This activity can also be automatically generated when performing screen scraping, along with a container. This activity can be useful in retrieving text from desktop and web applications. As input, this activity receives a Target, which can be either a Region variable, a UiElement variable or a selector, that helps you identify what you want to automate and where the actions must be performed. The target can also be automatically generated by using the Indicate on Screen functionality, which tries to identify UI elements in the indicated region, and generates selectors for them. If this does not work for you, then manual intervention might be required. The activity outputs a string variable that contains the extracted text.

Extract Structured Data extracts data from an indicated table. You can specify what information to extract by providing an XML string in the ExtractMetadata property. This can easily be generated with all the properties set by using the Data Scraping wizard. As input, this activity receives an XML string that defines what data is to be extracted from the indicated web page, and a Target, which can be either a Region variable, a UiElement variable or a selector, that helps you identify what you want to automate and where the actions must be performed. The target can also be automatically generated by using the Indicate on Screen functionality, which tries to identify UI elements in the indicated region, and generates selectors for them. If this does not work for you, then manual intervention might be required. The activity outputs a DataTable variable which contains the extracted data.

Text Exists checks if a text is found in a given UI element and returns a boolean variable that is true if the text exists and false otherwise. This activity is useful in all types of text-based automation, as it enables you to make decisions based on whether or not a given string is displayed, or it can be used to perform certain actions on a loop, by using it as a Condition in the Retry Scope activity. As input, this activity receives a string variable which contains the text to be searched, and a Target, which can be either a Region variable, a UiElement variable or a selector, that helps you identify what you want to automate and where the actions must be performed. The target can also be automatically generated by using the Indicate on Screen functionality, which tries to identify UI elements in the indicated region, and generates selectors for them. If this does not work for you, then manual intervention might be required. The activity outputs a boolean variable that states whether the text was found.