SAP Build Challenge – Week 3 – Automation Bots

[Dan_Wroblewski]

This post is part of the SAP Build Community Challenge (April 2023)

We're mixing it up for this week’s challenge, moving to SAP Build Process Automation and automation bots – which are a bit tricky but really cool!

It feels great to set up your bot, step by step, add all the activities and commands and configurations, and then click a button to have your bot do all your work. I love watching my automation open Excel, read data, open Outlook, create and send emails, open a web app, interact with it ... and a million other tasks.

Background

We will be using the RPA Challenge web site for the community challenge.

Essentially, you will have to do 3 things:

• Automatically retrieve data from an Excel.
• Add an "application" for the RPA Challenge web page – meaning, get your bot to recognize the web page and all its user interface elements.  
• Automatically enter data and click the submit button 10 times, once for each row of data.

The trick is that the fields on the web page move each time you click Submit, so you have to know how to find the right fields on the page (hint: based on CSS class).

If you’re new to SAP Build Process Automation, you should do the following tutorials:

• Build Your First Automation Using Excel SDK of SAP Build Process Automation, which will show you how to get data from an Excel (<30 minutes).
• Capture Orders Management Web Application, which shows you how to set up the web page as an "application" and define its screen elements (<30 minutes)
• Build an Automation for Orders Management, which shows you how to Define Screen Activities for an "application", so you can enter data in input fields and click buttons (~30 minutes).

Together, they will give you the knowledge to do the challenge.

Setup

You must have an SAP BTP account with SAP Build Process Automation. Luckily, it is available for free on the trial version of SAP BTP, or you can use your own account with the free-tier service plan. Setup is described in the SAP Process Automation now available in your Trial Account blog post.

You will also have to install the desktop agent, which automatically installs the Chrome extension. This is described in Install SAP Intelligent RPA On-Premise Components tutorial.

Challenge

Once you are set up, do the following:

1. Download the Excel from the RPA Challenge page.
   • You could add this task to the automation but you do not have to.              
2. In SAP Build Process Automation, do the following:
   1. Create a new automation.
   2. Read the data from the Excel.
   3. Click the Start button.
   4. Enter each row of data into the web page into the right fields, and click the Submit button. This must be done 10 times – once for each row. Remember, the locations of the fields change so you must identify the field correctly and enter the correct data into the correct field.
3. Run the automation (you can run it from test mode; you do not have to deploy it).
4. When complete, upload an image of the completed challenge that shows the system tray with the time, like this: 
   
   • Also, upload your complete automation definition,something like this (without blurring): 

Ideally, you should get a score of 100%, with a time of under 30 seconds. But even if you don't, show us what you were able to do.

It is a little challenging, especially for newbies to SAP Build Process Automation, but it is doable in a couple of hours, and worth it.

Good luck (and join this SAP Builders group! 😺

[ADR]

Hi Dan,

It was a new experience for me. Enjoyed it. Thanks.

Output Page

I found it very difficult to move around the steps at the build space as I could not find any scroll bar.  I had to take two screenshots by searching the step names.

Build area - 1Build area -2

Thanks again for the interesting challenge. 

Regards,

Anupam

[Dan_Wroblewski]

You had previous experience in iRPA to be able to do so fast, yes?

Was there anything that was challenging (besides taking screenshots)?

[ADR]

Hi Dan,

This was my first iRPA project. I went through few online videos last month and set up the environment. But could not manage any hands on. The tutorials you shared with this post have been very helpful. 

The steps I followed: First built the excel upload part and tested it following the tutorial 1 you shared. Then created the web page automation set up going through the third tutorial. Initially I started with static data without any loop. Then converted it to a loop when the static part was successful for at least one set. 

Challenges faced: It took me a while to understand the DOM elements and map those with variables. Your hint on the CSS helped here. Another problem I faced with mobile number. It is a numeric field in the excel. But the web page accepts string. I could not convert it to string using the toString() function in the 'edit expression' section. I changed the excel column to string and reuploaded the template. I'll explore this part further. 

I totally enjoyed it. 🙂

Regards,

Anupam

[ADR]

Got that Phone Number issue sorted out. There are two ways: 1. Using custom script to convert a numeric value to string. 2. Changing the field type in the reference structure while uploading from excel. Second one should be the right approach.

Regards,

Anupam

[Dan_Wroblewski]

In the end I was just able to use the toString function ... yes, at first, the editor did not like it but it somehow worked in the end.

[ADR]

Great. I'll give another try. Thanks Dan. 

[JJAIMES]

Hi @Dan_Wroblewski ,

How could proceed to create the SAP BTP environment if I get a message like this:

The options selected has been "For Me (I'm developer on my own or testing SAP BTP for my company)" but I am not able to create an SAP BTP environment to test.

Is there a way to solve it and continue with this challenge?

Thanks.

[Dan_Wroblewski]

Can you use the free trial?

https://cockpit.hanatrial.ondemand.com/trial/#/home/trial

[former_member136326]

Hi @Dan_Wroblewski,

I have done the setup using this free trial you shared and it worked. But now when helping a colleague doing the same steps, when we create the subscription it starts Processing and after some time the subscription fails. We retried several times and it keeps failing.

How can we solve this issue?

Thanks 😊

Sofia Bastos

[Dan_Wroblewski]

What does the error message say -- click on the red rectangle or click View Details.

Did you follow everything in this blog? https://blogs.sap.com/2022/09/09/sap-process-automation-now-available-in-your-trail-account/ 

[aaruljothi]

Hi Dan,

I was able to complete this task. I am a first timer and the instructions and reference tutorials helped me complete this.Below are my screenshots:

Thank you for all the efforts on the challenge.

Regards,

Aruljothi Arumugam

[Dan_Wroblewski]

Congrats ... that's the fastest time I have seen 😺

[Bharathi_S]

Hi @Dan_Wroblewski ,

I've completed the challenge, with help of your instructions and the reference tutorials. Thank you for that.

Here is my output,

[Dan_Wroblewski]

I thought it would be a little more difficult 😺

[abdullahgunes]

Hi @Dan_Wroblewski ,

I completed the challenge of this week. Tutorials were very helpful to complete.

This was the first application I build.

Looking forward to next week.

[saranraj_9021]

Hi @Dan_Wroblewski ,

I've completed the third challenge. 

Looking forward to the next one 🙂

[Farid]

Hello,

Here is my third contribution.

I am no developer, so understanding how to uniquely identify each field in the form, took me some time. The CSS Class hint was very helpful.

Thank you           

[Dan_Wroblewski]

Glad I gave that hint then 😺 nice work ... automation bots are pretty cool, no?

[MartinaKolafova]

Hi @Dan_Wroblewski , 

I have completed the challenge in 2578 milliseconds.

Martina

[Dan_Wroblewski]

Sounds like a new world record!

But know I am upgrading my CPU and will later try to beat you 🏎️

[enzoleon]

Hello @Dan_Wroblewski ,

Very useful challenge, I've been working with automations recently but first time using the "Application" artifact to explore the Web. I like the potencial.

Global:

Inside ForEach:

Thank you!

Enzo.

[Dan_Wroblewski]

Nice work 😺

[SandipAgarwalla]

Mine took 1309 millisecs, I am running it on Virtual Server Windows Hyper-V 2019

And the Automation itself

The Desktop Agent does not run on my local laptop, have raised an incident for it. Some security policies does not allow browser extension to run executables(CxChromeBroker.exe) to run. 

Currently implementing few use cases in Automation for a client, this challenge was fun. 

Regards, Sandip

[SandipAgarwalla]

Also I do not think we need 'class' identifier to identify a variable. The property "ng-reflect-name' should work

[rudavi]

Hi Daniel,

Thank you for the challenge!!

This is the result of my rpa challenge (3248 milliseconds): 

This is my build area :

Thank you again!

[Dan_Wroblewski]

Thanks for participating 😺

[PatrikMajer]

Hi Dan, 

thanks for another challenge. This one was propably the easiest for me 🙂 

Patrik

[Dan_Wroblewski]

Nice work ... I assume you used SAP Build Process Automation before? For newbies, it can be a little extra work but these automation bots are really cool.

[MioYasutake]

My submission for week 3.

I have created two automations: one for extracting data from Excel, and the other for posing the data to the RPA challenge site. 

The difficult part for me was to capture the web page. At the beginning, web pages were not detected at all. Then thanks to the comment in the blog post, I restarted my PC and pages got detected.

Next, I proceeded with type "Recorder" in capturing the web page. However, exporting the recorded application to an automation took too long (it was not responding), so I switched to "Manual Capture" option. After all, this was the right decision because I needed to specify selectors for each element on the screen.

I liked the testing capability of applications. This helped me recognize errors at an early stage. 

[Dan_Wroblewski]

Thanks so much for participating ... great that you kept at it and succeeded 😺

[nishantbansal91]

Hello @Dan_Wroblewski 

This is done with my colleague @Jarmel  

Very Interesting Challenge. We were able to even simulate the testing on the application screen. 

[Dan_Wroblewski]

Great ... but why didn't you do it? Or why didn't @Jarmel post it?😺

[Max_McP]

Hi Daniel,

I've built a few automations before.

I decided to add an extra step where I capture the result message and log it before closing the web page. 

One tip for the excel cloud link activity: You can set the range to only include the column letters and the last row will be detected automatically. For example, in this exercise I set my Range Definition to A:G

Kudos Sandip for the 1309ms execution!

[Dan_Wroblewski]

Thanks for the tip and for participating 😺

[javiermartin02]

Thanks @Dan_Wroblewski for another great challenge!!

 

[former_member136326]

Hi @Dan_Wroblewski, thank you for another great challenge! 

Mine took 2957 millisecs 😊

And the Automation

Sofia

[JJAIMES]

Hi @Dan_Wroblewski ,

Challenge done with some issues but manageables.

I was wondering how to send an email at the end of the process. It is not as simple as UIPath (please, take it as a constructive opinion).

You can see it in this URL:  https://youtu.be/_YS3XclEkfc

Thanks again and I'm looking forward to next challenge!

[Max_McP]

Hi @JJAIMES, sending an email will be similar to the steps you used to connect with excel. You can send an email with the results by following these steps:

1. Add the Outlook SDK in the Project Properties (gear icon in the top right corner)

2. Add the Open Outlook Instance, Send Email (Outlook), and Close Outlook Instance activities to the process and set the parameters for the send email activity

 

[Dan_Wroblewski]

You can send an email using Outlook automation, as @Max_McP  says above, or directly with SAP Build Process Automation, as explained in this blog: https://blogs.sap.com/2022/05/09/send-emails-from-automation-inside-sap-process-automation/

You'll have to set up a mail server, but you can use Gmail or whatever

Thanks for participating in the challenge 😺