Robotic process automation is a form of business process automation where user-configured robots can emulate the actions of users. Blue Prism is a pioneer of robotic process automation software, and this book gives you a solid foundation to programming robots with Blue Prism. If you've been tasked with automating work processes, but don't know ...

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• About Packt
• Contributors
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Case for Robotic Process Automation
  • What is robotic process automation?
  • Finding a process suitable for automation
    • Calculating time savings
  • The process definition document
    • Manual process description and target systems
    • Process diagram
    • Process details
    • Exceptions
  • Summary
• Chapter 2: Building the First Blue Prism Process
  • Inside a Blue Prism system
  • Launching the Blue Prism interactive client
  • Creating the first process
  • Getting to know the Blue Prism Process Studio
    • Adding pages
    • Editing pages
    • Renaming a process
    • Saving a process
    • Running the process for the first time
    • Stepping through the process
  • Join the Blue Prism community
  • Summary
• Chapter 3: Pages, Data Items, Blocks, Collections, and Loops
  • Taking a closer look at the toolbox
  • Pages
  • Inputs and outputs
    • Adding outputs to a page
    • Adding inputs to a page
    • Passing information from page to page
  • Data items
    • Adding a data item
    • Making a data item visible across pages
  • Blocks
  • Collections
    • Defining a collection
  • Loops
    • Adding a loop
  • Checking for errors using the validation tool
  • Summary
• Chapter 4: Actions, Decisions, Choices, and Calculations
  • Actions
    • Adding an action to count the number of rows in a collection
  • Decisions
    • Adding a decision to decide whether to proceed to purchase the items
    • Building an expression
    • Validating expressions
    • Evaluating expressions
  • Choices
    • Using a choice to determine the email address of the requester
  • Calculations
    • Calculating the email notification message
  • Multi calc
  • Summary
• Chapter 5: Implementing Business Objects
  • What is a business object?
  • Creating a business object
    • Organizing Business Objects into folders
  • Taking a look at Business Studio
    • Additional stages available in the Business Studio toolbox
  • Ready, start, action!
    • Renaming actions
  • Introducing the Application Modeller
  • Using the Navigate stage
    • Launching applications
    • Testing the launch action
    • Terminating applications
    • Testing the terminate action
  • Publishing an action
  • Using a custom Business Object from a process
  • Summary
• Chapter 6: Spying Elements
  • Spying elements on a web page
  • How does spying work?
  • Tweaking the match criteria
  • Tightening the match criteria
  • Adding elements
  • Categorizing elements
  • More spy modes
  • UI Automation mode
    • When spying by identifying does not work
  • UI Automation navigator
  • Surface automation with region mode
  • Summary
• Chapter 7: Write, Wait, and Read
  • Creating the search action
  • Writing to text boxes
  • Clicking buttons
  • The Wait stage
    • Always use a Wait stage whenever the screen changes
  • The Read stage
    • Reading the search results
  • Using dynamic match attributes
  • Actions have inputs and outputs too
  • Try it yourself – clicking Add to Cart
  • Putting it all together
  • Summary
• Chapter 8: Working with Excel
  • Reading the shopping list from Microsoft Excel
  • Importing the Excel VBO
  • Using MS Excel VBO to open, show, and close Microsoft Excel
    • Before we begin
    • Opening Excel
    • Closing Excel
  • What is the MS Excel VBO made up of?
    • What is Microsoft Excel VBA?
  • Opening an Excel file
  • Reading an entire worksheet into a collection
  • Writing to a cell
  • Considerations for comma separated values (CSV)
    • Converting a collection to CSV
    • Converting a CSV to a collection
    • Using the MS Excel VBO with CSV files
  • Summary
• Chapter 9: Sending and Receiving Emails
  • Using the MS Outlook VBO to manage emails
    • Sending emails
    • Formatting emails
    • Sending attachments
  • Receiving emails
    • Basic
    • Advanced
    • Expert
  • Summary
• Chapter 10: Control Room and Work Queues
  • Introducing the control room
    • Publishing a process to the control room
    • Running a process in the control room manually
    • Scheduling processes
  • What are work queues?
    • Creating a work queue
    • Adding items to the queue
    • Getting the next item in the queue
    • Checking for more items in the queue
    • Marking the item as complete
    • Updating the status
    • Marking the item as an exception
    • Tagging the item
    • Filtering items
  • Summary
• Chapter 11: Exception Handling
  • Expected and unexpected exceptions
  • Raising exceptions
  • Handling exceptions
    • The recover stage
    • The resume stage
    • Using the recover and resume stages to gracefully handle exceptions
    • Using blocks to group stages that share a common error handling routine
    • Handling unexpected errors
  • Debugging and troubleshooting from the control room
    • Recap – running the process from the control room
    • Log viewer
      • Controlling what gets logged
      • Searching for errors
      • Exporting to Excel
  • Summary
• Other Books You May Enjoy
• Index