Detailed Introduction UiPath with Practical | UiPath Tutorial

In this era of modern technologies and innovations,  we need to continuously keep upgrading the procedures required to perform simple and complex tasks. Thus, a gradual ramping up of the quality and quantity of the features of technology is required. One such technology is automation provided in various applications which reduces human intervention by replacing it with a robot. We don’t mean to say that replacement is with an actual robot. Rather, the automation is provided with an RPA tool. RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation. It means that whatever process is to be performed, it will be performed by a robot automatically. Companies require automation to meet the demands and accuracy of their product or service by the market. Through automation, the tasks, be it simple or complex, are performed by the robots without any human intervention. To provide automation, RPA provides several tools. One such RPA tool is UiPath.

Uipath Introduction

Ui path is one of the most widely used RPA tools in today’s era. It is one of the best and easiest tools to start within the RPA field. It is easy to learn and understand and can be used for both simple and complex tasks. Uipath has been named a leader with the highest possible scores in Strategy and Market Presence. Companies like Airbus, NASA, DHL, AutoDesk, HP, Fujifilm use Uipath to attain automation in different tasks.

UiPath is an open platform tool, which provides many built-in, customizable integrations with multiple technologies such as ERP, BPM, and AI. UiPath provides robotic power capabilities for automation to organizations. UiPath includes products like Platform, Studio, Robots, and Orchestrator. UiPath is operated in industries such as BPO, Finance, Insurance, Healthcare, Telecommunications, Manufacturing, Public Sector, Retail, and BPA.

Software robots also called Bots, are developed with the help of the Uipath tool which performs and mimics human actions to complete certain tasks with higher accuracy and speed as compared to human performance. UiPath also reduces the human workload in the way that a repetitive and redundant task is performed by the bots itself without any human interference in it. This way the human can focus only on the main task that requires intervention and human intelligence rather than wasting a fraction of brain activity on irrelevant redundant tasks. Uipath is used mainly for Windows Desktop Automation. It provides easy methods like drag and drops user interfaces to make it all easier to develop.

History of UiPath

UiPath was founded in 2005 by the Romanian entrepreneurs, Daniel Dines and Marius Tîrcă. The company was developed in Bucharest, Romania, and later opened offices in London, New York City, Bangalore, Paris, Singapore, Washington, D.C., and Tokyo. In 2017, the company was known to have 590 employees and then moved its headquarters to New York to be closer to its international customer base. In 2016, the company had 100 customers which became 700 customers in the year 2017. In 2019, UiPath crossed 5,000 customers worldwide.

UiPath advanced from #5 in share in 2017 to #1 in share in 2018. In 2019, UiPath was ranked #3 on the Forbes Cloud 100. The company was the featured cover story of the September 30, 2019, Forbes print edition with UiPath CEO Daniel Dines called "Boss of the Bots.”UiPath was ranked first in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 on November 6, 2019. In April 2020, UiPath has named the top tech company and #2 overall in the Financial Times 1000, FT1000 ranking: Americas' fastest-growing companies 2020. In June 2020, UiPath was named to the CNBC Disruptor 50 2020.

Why use UiPath

There are many automation tools other than Uipath such as Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, Pega, etc. However, UiPath has advantages over them. Some of the key features of UiPath that distinguish it from other tools are:

• Desktop automation is a key feature of UiPath.
• Data handling processes and techniques are better in UiPath as compared to the other automation tools.
• Writing logic and methods is easier in UiPath as compared with other automation tools in RPA.
• UiPath provides the ability to record with its varieties of controls.

Architecture of Uipath

There are mainly three layers of UiPath architecture.  These are the Client layer, the server layer, and the persistency layer. These layers and their functionality can be understood as follows :

Client Layer: The Client Layer is composed of the UiPath Studio and the UiPath Robot. UiPath Studio is a platform where users create the automation workflows, and then, those tasks are executed by UiPath Robot.

The UiPath Robot has two components:

• UiPath Agent Service: This service is used to display the available jobs in the system tray. It can also request to start /stop jobs and change settings.
• UiPath Executor Service:  This service is used to run the given jobs under a Windows session.

Server Layer:  All server details are displayed in the server layer. The server layer mainly consists of UiPath Orchestrator. When the robots are completely developed and ready to execute the tasks, the entire project is uploaded on the server. The project can be executed on multiple systems with the help of an Orchestrator.

The Orchestrator controls the entire project. It monitors project activities, schedules software robots for execution, and generates summarized reports based on filtered requirements. It helps to orchestrate software robots to continue executing repetitive tasks.

Persistence Layer: This layer mainly consists of database servers. All the configuration details of the robots are stored in this layer. The configuration details include different user's data, their respective robots, assigned tasks, logging information, and asset details, etc. All these details are entered by the users in the Orchestrator.

Also, the persistency layer is responsible to keep the log details updated by the UiPath agent services. The logs are mainly helpful for finding errors and rectify them. The process-level data is generally stored in relational database management systems such as SQL Server. This makes searching for logs easier from the large quantity of data.

The persistency layer also takes care of queues and the tasks in queues.

Products of UiPath

UiPath includes some other products that widen the features and functionalities of work with the tool efficiently. The tool mainly offers the following three products:

Image source: Google Search

UiPath Studio: UiPath studio is a user-friendly interface within the tool that allows users to plan and design visually the different automation processes with the help of diagrams. These diagrams are in the form of a structural representation of particular tasks to be performed.

UiPath Robot: UiPath Robots are used to execute the processes designed in UiPath Studio by converting the processes into a task. These robots are used to assign different steps and execute them in the same way as human but without any human intervention. UiPath robots are designed to automatically start executing tasks when a specified activity occurs on the machine.

UiPath Orchestrator: In UiPath, the Orchestrator is a web-based application that provides options to deploy, monitor, schedule, and control software bots and processes. It is a centralized platform used to control/manage all software bots.

Types of Bots in UiPath

There are two types of Robots. Attended and Unattended.

• Attended Robots help human workers speed front-office tasks. These bots are triggered by user commands or human directions.
• Attended Robots operate in the background while users work on higher-level tasks.
• Unattended Robots run back-office tasks in a physical or virtual environment.
• They can be scheduled to self-start which prevents the need for any human intervention.

UiPath Features:

UiPath comes with a broad spectrum of unique and attractive features that distinguishes it from other RPA tools. Some of those features are:

• Pre-defined Activity Sets

UiPath includes 300+ inbuilt activities for process automation as well as application integration design works. These activities are available in the activities pane section, and they include numerous design works like data extraction, data entry, and automation activities.

In addition to built-in packages, the user can also import packages like PDF, Mail, and Excel.

• Workflow Drag and Drop

In UiPath, the user can create visual process steps by simply dragging and dropping associated activities onto the graphical workspace. Then, these processes can be converted into the visual workflow with the help of connection properties.

• Recording Support

The user can record the functions and create it as an automated process sequence using UiPath. The four kinds of recording options available in UiPath are:

1. Basic Recording – Dedicated to automating single activities and widely used for the creation of the full selector of each activity
2. Desktop Recording – Applicable for multiple actions as well as desktop applications.
3. Web Recording – Widely used for browsing and recording activities in the web pages.
4. Citrix Recording – Extensively used for recording the keyboard, images, and virtualized environment automation.

• Attended and Unattended Automation

UiPath is the only one RPA tool that supports both the attended and unattended automation in the enterprise RPA system. An attended software robot can run on your PC, and you can decide when to begin it. Unattended automation enables automation on the remote system even out of availability on a specified timed schedule.

• Workflow Templates and Reusability

UiPath makes it easy for the users to save their workflows as templates and it preserves the original workflow because the modifications are only done on the copy in production. Besides, it is possible to copy the templates to create small chunks of common automation. It enables users to combine the small workflow chunks and build a large portion of the complicated scripts of automation.

• Multi-tenancy

With this unique feature, UiPath RPA improves the cost and operational efficiency as it provides segregated and protected spaces for multiple users from various departments in enterprises like a CFO, HR, etc.

• Inherit .net and C# Functions

Some of the RPA automation requires coding, but less compared to hard programming. In that case, UiPath inherits .net and C# functions to develop custom activities and macro coding. As the visual activities are integrated with these languages, the developers get a Visual Studio touch but in the UiPath context. Besides, they can design their own C# packages and import them to Studio to employ as visual activities.

• Collaborative Integration

Along with the new artificial intelligence technology, UiPath makes it possible to integrate with any ERP and DMS. Enterprises can integrate such a system using the orchestrator feature. Moreover, UiPath products integrate well into desktop applications and include rich built-in handling for Word, Email, Excel, and other applications.

• Image and Text-based Process Automation

To support this automation, UiPath comes up with some features that can stimulate the mouse or keyboard inputs like clicking, hover, text recognition, and OCR activities. Image or text automation is generally used in situations where the UI automation would not work as in the settings of a virtual machine or in the cases where the conventional methods are inadequate to discover selectors.

• OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

UiPath offers an all-inclusive solution to automate semi-structured data sources with the help of the OCR feature. The UiPath robots automatically interpret the process as well as classify non-standard forms and documents. UiPath RPA is stronger in its capability to recognize the images on the screen.

• Robust Governance & Optimal Security

With the centralized management for complex operations, UiPath enables effective governance as well as compliances through release management, scheduling, remote control, asset management, robot workload, and custom roles authorization. Moreover, UiPath operates with a locked screen, hence automated processes can execute in total privacy.

UiPath Installation:

Now, we will move further to the installation of Uipath in the machine that we want to work on:

We need to know a bit about the various available versions of UiPath. These are four versions as of now that are available.

1. Community Cloud: This version is used by small teams and individuals to practice and understand the UiPath at a learner level for automating tasks on it.
2. Studio: This version helps those individuals who want to practice automation tasks at an enterprise level.
3. Enterprise-level: This version enables those users who want to use cloud-based service for performing automation tasks. It includes Studio, Robots, and Orchestrator.
4. Enterprise Server: This is an on-premise version of the entire enterprise automation platform. It also consists of UiPath Studio, Robots, and Orchestrator.

Now, we will install the Community Cloud edition of UiPath. The installation process is the same for other versions. UiPath Community Cloud is the free edition of UiPath. Other versions come with 60 days of the free trial period.

The steps to install UiPath are given below:

1. Navigate through the official website of UiPath,i.e. https://www.uipath.com/
2. Click on the “Try UiPath Free” button as shown in the picture below:

3. You will be forwarded to the next screen. You can create an account on UiPath by signing up with any of your google account, Microsoft account, LinkedIn account, or also simply by your Email account.

4. Here, we will be using signup with email. You can choose whichever account you want to. Enter all the required details in the Sign Up form :

5.Once you submit the form by clicking on Sign Up, you will receive a confirmation mail on your registered email account.

Open the mail and confirm the registration by clicking on the “Verify Email” button.

6.Once you Verify the Email, you will be redirected to the customized home page of UiPath Automation Cloud. you need to click on the “resource center” link.

7.You will be directed to another screen that consists of versions available for downloads. You need to download the stable version for UiPath Community Edition.

8.It will start the downloading process and once it is completed, double click on the UiPath SetUp File to start the installation process. When the whole process is completed, you will come across a screen somewhat as given below. You need to click on “Community License”.

9.Next, We need to click on the “UiPath Studio Pro Community” on the next screen.

10.After that, you need to choose the “stable” version out of the  “preview” version and “stable” version.

11.On the next screen, we need to select the required source control support from the given options and then click on the “Continue” button.

12.Now, you will be directed to the main screen of UiPath as shown below. You can start and build your project by selecting from the given options.

The installation process finishes here. Now, you are ready to get started with your first automation project.

Practical

Let us start with a demo project to have a glimpse of how things work out in UiPath.

We will access the data in an excel file by the means of a UiPath project. First of let us create an excel file that contains data of employees.

For example:

Now after closing this file, open UiPath studio you will come across this main window of the Studio.

Now click on Process for a New Project that will open a New Blank Process for automation. Name it according to you for convenience. Also, it is a good practice to give it an ideal description.

Now click on the create button. It will open a blank main workflow as following.

Now you can start with any of the activities such as workflow or sequence as per your accordance. Here, we would be selecting a sequence activity from the activity panel. Give it a suitable name. Here we are naming it as reading Excel File. After that, select the Excel Application Scope from the activity panel and drop it inside the Read Excel File sequence region.

Excel Application Scope is used to access the file which is to be acted upon. We have to mention the path of the existing file in the textbox area. Open the file manager and copy the path of the file and then paste it in the textbox and press the Enter key. Next thing is to specify the range in terms of how much data is to be accessed and on which sheet is to be accessed. For that function, we have to drag and drop the Read Range activity inside the Do activity.

Now, create a variable for the Read Range Activity so that the data can be stored in that variable. We named it ExcelData in our case. Now to read the data from rows of excel sheet, drag and drop the for each row activity and mention the name of the variable that contains the data,i.e., ExcelDat as shown in the picture below. Drop a message box that will display the data of the sheet and write the values in it as below:

Save and Run the program with the F5 key. You will get the output in the following form.

Click on the OK button and the data will be displayed one after the other until the complete display is done.

You can create many other automation programs in many fields with the help of UiPath. Till then, Happy learning!!