As I have mentioned in my earlier posts, Uipath studio is a very easy-to-understand, user-friendly tool. The studio UI really makes it easy to navigate throughout. Once you create a project in UiPath studio, you will see a screen similar to this:
(The interface changes a bit as they add tiny changes with every new update, so don't worry if your studio looks a bit different than this one, it's totally fine. the main components are gonna be the same with just some tiny upgrades to make the UI even more awesome.)
The Middle section of the screen is the design workspace, where we can create our workflows and develop our automation robots.
What are Workflows - Workflows are basically small blocks of automation created in the Uipath studio. A project can consist of one or multiple workflows depending upon the complexity of the process. A workflow is basically made up of multiple activities. It's kind of a container where we put the activities in.
You can create new workflows, by clicking on New under the "Design" panel. Uipath basically offers 4 types of workflow diagrams(structures) to choose from:
1. Sequence: Sequences have a simple linear representation that flows from top to bottom and are best suited for simple scenarios when activities follow each other. When you are developing a simple project, where your activities work after another one by one, You should opt for Sequence in that scenario. For example, they are useful in UI/Desktop automation, when navigation and typing/clicking happen one click/keystroke at a time. the sequences are very easy to assemble and understand, so they are the preferred layout for most simple workflows.
2. Flowcharts: Flowcharts can be used in a variety of cases, from small ones to big projects. you can reuse these as snippets in your other projects. That's one of the many features flowcharts provide. Another very important aspect of flowcharts is that, unlike sequences, they have this option of multiple branching logical operators like flow decision, Flow switch, which enables us to create complex decision making in the big business processes.
3. State Machine - As the name suggests, A state machine basically is a type of workflow that uses a finite number of states in its execution. The idea is pretty simple, It goes into a state when it is triggered by an activity, and it exits that state when another activity is triggered.
The most important aspect/feature to understand about state machines are the transitions, as they also enable you to add conditions based on which to jump from one state to another.
Basically, There are 3 parts to a State Machine:
Init State - This is the entry point of your automation.
Transition State - Here, You define the logic for the processes.
Final State - This is the endpoint of all your processes.
Each of these states then has contains three sections, Entry, Exit, and Transition(s), Only the Final State only contains one section, Entry.
Entry - This enables you to add entry triggers for that particular state it is in here, like initializing or assigning some variables or taking some user input, etc.
Exit - This section enables you to give exit triggers for the selected state.
Transitions - This section further contains 3 subsections: Trigger, Condition, and Action, these sections enable you to add a trigger for the next state, or add a condition under which an activity or sequence is to be executed.
4. Global Handler - This is a type of workflow designed to determine the project’s behavior when encountering an execution error. This sequence steps in during execution when the project encounters an unmanaged error.
You can choose various actions to be taken after the Global Exception Handler steps in:
Continue - The exception is re-thrown.
Ignore - The exception is ignored, and the execution continues from the next activity.
Retry - The activity which threw the exception is retried.
Abort - The execution stops after running the current handler.
On the bottom of the designer panel, there are three tabs variables, arguments, and imports - you can create, change data types, set defaults for variables and arguments from here. you can also import needed namespaces from the import tab.
On the left section of the screen, we have 3 panels - project panel, activities panel, and snippets panel, you can toggle between them by clicking on them.
In the project panel, you can view all the project files, workflows & dependencies under the current project folder.
so, whenever you create a new project in the UiPath studio, a workflow file(.xaml), called main.xaml is created, by default.
so, by convention, all our UiPath workflows have this .xaml extension.
the project.json file here stores all the project details - name, descriptions, dependency stuff, and so on. whenever you create a new workflow or a folder or file, you can view & open those from here, in the project panel. you can open any xaml file from here by just double-clicking on it.
Next is the activities panel, you can view all the available activities that can be added to the current workflow. in uipath, instead of writing codes, we use these activities to develop a workflow. you can use the search box to find a particular activity, then simply drag and drop that activity to add it to the currently opened workflow, easy peasy.
Then there is the snippet panel, where you can find some sample XAML files, snippets that you can use in your projects. By default, there are a few pre-built reusable workflows, this can come in very handy.
That's all for this ar for now. Stay tuned for the next articles. Please visit our YouTube channel Project RPA to learn from our videos and do hands-on projects. Please Like, Share, and Subscribe to our channel!!
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That’s the end of this article. Look around for more learning articles on the leading RPA tools!
Thanks a ton for stopping by!
Puja :)