Hello friends,
So, as you may know, I am learning to RPA. And through this process, I'd like to say, I admire you all because this requires a ton of logic and focus.
The Foundation training, docs and all the answered questions in this community have been an immense help. But I decided that I needed a passion project to test my padawan skills. And so, I created this:
This, my friends, is the Star Wars Prequel Memes Bank. It works like this:
The Fetch URL Action Stage runs a BO I created using the Application Modeller. It:
- Kills all instances of Chrome
- Clears the clipboard
- Launches a new instance of Chrome, and navigates to the r/prequelmemes subreddit
- Sorts the feed by "Top This Week"
- Clicks on the top post
- Copies the URL in the address bar to the clipboard
- Saves that URL to a Global Data Stage
- Cleans up
After that, there are a series of Excel VBO Actions which:
- Open an instance of Excel and records the instance handle
- Open a specific workbook that I already set up with headers
- Shows that instance to avoid background processing weirdness
- Finds an empty row
- Sets todays date as reference in the first column
- Pastes the URL gathered from the Fetch URL BO into the second column
- Saves and closes the Workbook
- Cleans up
So, now, I have a bank of beautiful Star Wars Prequel Memes to peruse whenever I'm feeling low. Perhaps slightly more valuable than that though, I learned a ton about automating through making a LOT of mistakes:
- I learned all about SendKeys! Which was fun.
- I painfully learned about the importance of proper clean up after processing
- I used Application Modeler and UI Automation to work with specific elements on a specific website, which helped me cut down the number of stages needed
- I learned a lot about data stages, instances and handles - in particular how useful data stages can be purely for debugging problems by having the data that the process is working with displayed on screen
Anyway - I had fun! If you have any advice on how I can improve, upskill or what I can try to build next, give me a reply 🙂
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💙 Michael
(I'm part of the SS&C Blue Prism Community Team)
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@steven.boggs:
Now this is podracing!
This is great, Michael. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks @steven.boggs!
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💙 Michael
(I'm part of the SS&C Blue Prism Community Team)
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