From the course: Complete Guide to UiPath RPA Development

Validate your installation - create a bot! - UiPath Tutorial

From the course: Complete Guide to UiPath RPA Development

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Validate your installation - create a bot!

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- [Instructor] So now that we've installed the three most important components of the UiPath RPA platform, I'd like to guide you through the process of creating a new project and publishing it into Orchestrator so we can try to run it as an unattended robot here in the Assistant, but also trigger it from Orchestrator to run as an unattended automation on your development machine. I'll give you a more detailed walkthrough of the UiPath Studio interface in a future lecture. But for now, just follow along with these steps closely and copy everything I do. The way we create a new automation project is by clicking on the Process tab here at the top right? So I'll click on that and I'll call this new process CreatePublishRun. And it's a best practice to use what we call camel case notation, which means each word is capitalized and there's no spaces. By default, UiPath Studio wants to save your new projects in some variation of this C:\User's folder. And of course, this would be your name, and that's fine if you want to use that. I personally have a habit of clicking on this folder and going into this PC, clicking on my C drive. And what I do is I create a folder on my C drive called development because I develop in several different languages. And inside that folder, want to double click. You see that I've got a UiPath folder and various other folders. So I'm going to double click on my UiPath folder and click Select Folder to save the project here. I'm going to leave this compatibility dropdown set as Windows, because this is the new latest and greatest way for creating UiPath automation projects. It replaces the Windows Legacy approach. But notice, we also have an option to create a cross platform project, and this will run on Apple computers and Linux as well. The problem with this though, is you get a reduced set of functionality because not every Windows .NET feature will run on Linux and Mac. So we're going to leave this as Windows, and we'll leave the language set to VB. C# can be used, but it's not as full featured and stable as VB. And honestly, most of the documentation you're going to find online is going to be using VB as well. So I'll click on Create. And now UiPath is open, and you can see the title has my project name, CreatePublishRun. There's a ribbon up here at the top with a lot of cool buttons that I'll talk about later. And these two panels on the left side and the right side are things we're going to use a lot in the future. I'll go ahead and close this dialogue here. What I want you to notice immediately is that both of these vertical panels have tabs at the bottom with more features. For this demo, we're going to click on activities because this is where all of the things you can use to automate stuff can be found. I'll walk through and discuss some of these in a future video. But for now, what I want you to do is click up here in the search text box and type in M-E-S-S-A-G-E. And now down at the very bottom, we see message box. This is an activity and all it's going to do is pop up a dialogue that has a message in it. So we're going to click on this and drag it to the center of this main sequence and let go. That's how simple UiPath makes it to build up automated flows. Now, click in the text box in the center and open a double quote, and notice that UiPath automatically closes that double quote and leaves the cursor between them. Type Hello from a robot. And then when you click away, notice that error goes away. Hit Control + S to save your project. And now we can run this by going up here into this ribbon, clicking on the small arrow at the bottom, and selecting Run. So I'll click on that. Notice it compiles. UiPath Studio goes away and we see our message box shows up. Now when I click on that, the automation will finish and UiPath Studio will return. So congratulations, you've just built your first software robot. It's that simple. Now, this is where most UiPath courses will stop and they'll just go on and teach you more about these activities over here, and that's fine. But again, I think it's important for you to understand how the ecosystem works, including Orchestrator and the Assistant. So to publish this into Orchestrator so that it will show up in our Assistant, all we need to do is go up here to the Publish menu and click on that button. And notice it's going to publish it with this name that we gave the project, which matches that. And when you click on Publish Options, you can see that it gives us two choices. We can publish it to the tenant process feed, or we can publish it into the personal workspace feed. So I'll talk more about that in a future video as well. All I need to do to publish this to Orchestrator is simply click on Publish. Now we've just sent our software robot to the server. I'll click Okay. And when I minimize Studio and go to Orchestrator, I'll click on the Orchestrator button to open it. Notice, we already see the automation over here in Assistant before I even got to Orchestrator. Remember that we published it to My Workspace. So when I click on the My Workspace folder, we see that we now have one process that was automatically created for us, and I can run that process as an attended robot by simply clicking on this play button over here in the Assistant. Notice, it says Awaiting install. That means that the package for this automation is still here on the server, and only once I click on this play button is it going to drag that package down to the local computer and run it. So let's do that. I'll click on Play. We see it says Started processing, and it shows us this new panel that gives us information about the running job. And in a future video, I'll show you how we can write log messages in here to communicate with the robot user. We see our message box, and now when I click on Okay, we'll see that the job will finish up and we'll get a status here in Orchestrator. Awesome. We just ran this as an attended bot. So now let's see if we can run it as an unattended bot. To do that, I'm going to close the Assistant and I'll click on Processes here. And notice we have some sub tabs, Jobs and Triggers. Triggers will allow us to schedule this at a particular time, and I'll show you that in a future video. But for right now, let's go ahead and try to run this manually as a job. Notice, we see here that our attended job is represented in this Jobs panel. I'm going to click on Start, and this presents a new view where I can click here to select my process. I can leave the runtime as unattended. And notice down here in Machine, when I click on this, we see my Bryan_Dev machine. I don't have to select that. I can leave it as any machine. And this automation would choose any machine that was assigned to this folder. You remember when we assigned my machine to this folder in the previous video? Just for kicks though, I'm going to go ahead and click on this and select my dev machine. And notice now, it gives me an option to say, let's click on this exact machine. So what that tells us is this is the machine template and multiple machines can be connected to the one machine template. So again, that's more advanced stuff that I'll talk about in my UiPath level two course. But for now, you could either leave this as any or you can click on your machine to select it. So now when I click on Start, we see that it takes us back to the Jobs page and shows us that this is pending. Now it's running. We see the message box, that's awesome. I click on okay, and it says Successful. Nice. We've run our process as both attended and also unattended. Now, the cool thing about both of these is that you can click on these three dots over here and you can view the logs of this job. So if I click on View Logs, we'll see chronological information that this job emitted, and we have control of this. Notice these two were created automatically, the start and the stop. But in future videos, I'll show you how you can use the log message activity to write anything you want into this log so that you can reflect the work that the bot is doing. So that's it, we've had a quick tour of how to use Studio, Orchestrator, and the Assistant, which are the three core components of the UiPath Automation platform. Lots more good stuff to come.

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