Ivan Alcantara: November 2020

Friday 13 November 2020

TagUI (Free RPA), Version 6 Game Changers

TagUI version 6 brings to us three game changers. First it now has a live mode which can execute line by line. This is a tremendous time saver. No need to run the whole program every time you make a change just to see if the added or changed line of code works. The old method is time consuming and frustrating. With this change, experience becomes similar to console programming in R which is great. Also, a big bonus to this new feature is how well it works with mouse_xy(). I used to just rely on xpath and images and was not really able to use the coordinates feature. With the live feature, I just put the mouse where I need the robot to click, run mouse_xy() and that's it I have the coordinates. Since I'm in live mode I just add the code I want using the coordinates and I immediately see the results.

Below, I run live mode. I hover the mouse over the Preview button in my blog then use echo `mouse_xy()` to get the coordinates of the Preview button and in the second line instruct the robot to click the Preview button using the coordinates. The robot executes quickly. That's one advantage to using coordinates over OCR, it works faster. Using Xpath is also fast but it doesn't work for all sites and isn't available for desktop application. Using coordinates, the robot can click anywhere on your monitor including the shortcuts on your desktop to launch applications.

The second game changer is the deploy function. If the script that you create has to be run by an end user, that end user will at least need to know the basics or running a program in command prompt. That doesn't make for a good user experience. With the deploy function, running a script in now just double clicking a file. For the programmer, creating this shortcut can be done in less than 5 seconds. Before this feature was available I used Excel as the front and inserted shell code within vba just to be able launch the script with a button

Below, I use -d function

The cmd file is created. Double clicking the cmd file runs the script

The third game changer really feels like magic. You can instruct the robot to click on a a word using OCR with just a single line of code. No need to provide the coordinates, xpath or image as in the previous version. If the button has a unique label, the robot will find that button and click it.

Here I ask the robot to click the Preview button in my blog

The robot correctly finds the Preview button and launches the preview

I then tell the robot to hover over Preview

This time the mouse pointer hovers over the preview tab. This was the tab that was created when the robot clicked preview earlier. This should be a reminder to us to be careful in using this function. It works but it might not work in the way we expect it to as in this case where Preview now appears on two different locations on the screen