8.5

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RPA overview

The section describes robots – WorkFusion Bot configs that execute actions of a human Worker interacting with a user interface of a computer system.

Robots have the following capabilities:

  • Clicking through a browser web page or a desktop application on a remote server.
  • Reading and writing content from or to user interface fields.
  • Iterating through a set of predefined steps (looping) and executing steps upon some conditions (if-then-else logic).
  • Executing scripts, opening applications and browser windows.

RPA high-level architecture

The following diagram shows how WorkFusion RPA works:

  1. WorkFusion engine executes RPA Bot configs having the robotics-flow plugin.

  2. All instructions go to RPA Grid Router (Cluster) which distributes them among available RPA Hubs (Orchestrators / Load Balancers) depending on their capacity and supported capabilities.

  3. RPA Hub searches for RPA Nodes with a suitable set of capabilities (e.g. installed browsers and desktop apps to be automated), and when found, creates a new session on that Node.

  4. RPA Node acts like a Robot Aggregator:

    1. Receives a set of instructions from RPA Hub.
    2. Initializes a Robot – Browser Driver (Selenium) or Desktop Driver (AutoIt).
    3. Executes script instructions one by one (for example, open Excel application, copy all content from the 2nd sheet, save it to a text file, put the file into SharePoint folder).

One RPA script can use several RPA Nodes with different capabilities, for example:

  1. Node 1: to run a Windows desktop application and get initial data from it.

  2. Node 2: to run an Internet Explorer browser, input that data to a CRM web application, and keep browser opened.

  3. Node 3: to run a console application and read customer balance from it.

  4. Finally, RPA script can switch to Node 2 again to save a transaction in CRM, and close the browser on completion.

RPA Development Process

To start developing RPA scripts, you need to:

  • Install WorkFusion Studio IDE.
  • Install RPA Grid and make necessary Windows, Java, and IE tuning.
  • Learn how to create Bot Tasks and use Web-Harvest plugins.
  • Learn Robotics API and simplified API cheatsheet.
  • Learn how to use desktop automation tools.

The RPA scripts development life-cycle looks like this:

  1. Develop PRA script in WorkFusion Studio IDE.

  2. Debug and test it on local machine using RPA Grid.

  3. Do one of the following:

    1. Deploy a Bot config bundle to Nexus using the WorkFusion repository (recommended way).

    2. OR create a Bot Task in WorkFusion and paste the tested RPA script from WF Studio manually.

  4. Set Bot Task parameters (Streaming, Number of Threads, etc.) and run it as a part of a Business Process.

  5. Watch the RPA script execution on a remote RPA server managed by WorkFusion app through RPA Grid Router. You need to set an RDP connection to the RPA Server – contact your system administrator for details.

  6. If something fails:

    1. Check the RPA Hub and Node console logs on RPA server.
    2. Check the BP error logs.
tip

Watch the video explaining how to add RPA steps to your process and watch config execution on the RPA server.

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