Intelligent Recording tips and techniques

With Robot Studio, you can record many different applications and processes. However, not every application or process lends itself to being recorded. Consider the following when evaluating your business processes for recording viability:

• A recordable process is one that has a logical flow of steps and is used repeatedly in your workflow.
• A green gear icon indicates the availability of Automatic Step Creation. A blue gear icon indicates that you must use Manual Step Creation to record the application.
• If no gear icon is available, the application is either not configured correctly or not available for Intelligent Recording.
• To record a web application with Automatic Step Creation, your web application must function in Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. Legacy applications running in Internet Explorer do not support Automatic Step Creation.
• To use Automatic Step Creation to record a Windows application, the application must be written for .NET, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), or Windows Forms. Other applications, such as Java applications, do not support Automatic Step Creation.
  • Consult your organization’s IT department if you are unsure on what technology an application is built.
• Microsoft Office products, such as Word and Excel, are not available for Intelligent Recording.
• Mainframe and green screen applications are not available for Intelligent Recording.

When you’re recording a workflow, you test each control to ensure that the automation will function as you intend. For example, when you enter text into a text box, the default Action is Set Text. However, some applications, particularly websites, listen for keystrokes to update the text box input. To make sure that your automation will function correctly, you test your process to make sure that the desired text is properly entered into the text box.

To test a step, open the Step Editor by clicking the Gear icon next to the control, or selecting Edit step from the Recording Assistant. You can modify the step if required, by setting options such as Action or Value, and then clicking the Test button.

When you’re recording an application, a green gear icon in general means that you can use Automatic Step Creation for the element. However, you may notice that the Gear icon changes color from a lighter shade of green to a darker shade of green.

A light green Gear icon indicates that Robot Studio has started interrogating the element in question. A dark green Gear icon indicates that the interrogation process has completed and that the element has been created as a control for automation use.

When recording a web application, you might see an overlay that looks like the one in the image below. This overlay appears following actionable events to ensure that Pega Robotics Automator properly captures all your actions before navigating away or refreshing the page.

Actionable events are events that trigger some kind of operation in the web application, such as navigating to a new page or submitting a form. When you trigger an actionable event, Pega Robotics Automator catches the event and pauses it. It displays the overlay and records all your actions leading up to the event. Then, once it has recorded your actions, it triggers the event so the workflow can proceed to the next step. The overlay is a visual reminder to allow the automator to complete the recording and perform the actionable event. Do not click to disrupt the recording.

When recording a web application, you can create controls for only interactable elements Interactable elements include:

• Form elements, such as input boxes, text areas, and drop down lists.
• Buttons
• Links

Common elements that you cannot record include normal text elements on the page such as paragraphs or headers. These elements must be interrogated manually  to use their values in your automation.

Sometimes, you must record specific elements to extract the values necessary for your automation. For example, <span> elements in webpages are not interactable elements but are sometimes used in place of proper hyperlinks. Since the element is not interactable, your click to navigate to the next area of the webpage is not captured in the recording process.

As a work-around to not being able to record that specific step, you can add a Manual step to your automation. A manual step pauses the automation to wait for interaction from the user, and then continues running the automation. You can add a manual step by right-clicking on the Recording assistant to open the Manual step editor.

In the above image, the user is adding a manual step that displays a Message Box instructing the user to click on the Customers link on the page. Once the user confirms that operation by clicking OK, the automation resumes.

If your automation requires a value from the user, such as text or a number, you should set the Action to Show Input Box. The value entered by the user is then usable in the automation.

Using manual steps allows you to still automate the majority of your workflow and avoid being blocked by a non-recordable action. If you’re developing the automation as part of a larger team, an experienced developer can use manual interrogation to automate the action required and eliminate the manual step.

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