Creating Your First Bots

Overview

There’s no better way to learn about building bots than by actually getting hands on and doing it. In this learning experience, developers will walk through creating their first bots. With a foundational understanding of what RPA is and how bots can solve problems, there is no better way to learn about creating bots than getting hands on experience.

Using Automation 360’s cloud-based bot editor, let’s start off by building a few simple bots before moving on to more complex user cases. Learning to become a good RPA developer does not differ from learning any other skill - it takes observation, practice, and repetition to build the skill set. Once some experience is under your belt, tackling more complex automation opportunities is well within reach! Use the exercises that follow to practice. Get your bots to work, understand why they work, and tweak them a bit to understand how changes impact how they run.

To Do

Follow along in this Let’s Build a Bot video tutorial to build a bot with Micah Smith.

In this exercise, instead of web scraping, we will ask developers to use an Automation Anywhere bot to fill data into fields.

1. Pay close attention to the process followed in this video:

   1. Start with the requirements.

   2. Break down the requirements into logical steps/groups, creating a flowchart as necessary to help visualize the flow.

   3. Building a testing a bot to mimic that flowchart and ensuring the bot meets the needs of the initial requirements.

Check out this tutorial to build a bot that can extract a table from a webpage.

Data extraction, sometimes referred to as “scraping”, is a common use-case for RPA. It’s not uncommon to take data from one system/application/page, possibly make some modifications or validations of the data, then put it into another system/application/page.

Enroll in and complete the Automation Anywhere University course entitled Hello Automation 360 Bot: Getting Started with Building Bots.

Summary

The best way to get better at something is with practice. Practice pages like the login exercise used above and the Nasdaq page give developers the opportunity to get hands on experience. With real pages, see how bots can be created to automate data entry and data extraction. Moving on to future learning experiences, take the lessons learned in this Creating Your First Bots segment and continue to build your knowledge by creating more dynamic automations.

Resources

Tutorials

Other tutorials: Getting started with building bots

Video Tutorials

How to Use the Capture Action in Automation 360
Building a Bot for Essential Tasks

Reference Items

Getting started with the basics of Automation Anywhere
Where to get technical help
Object and Actions Available Using Capture
Using the Recorder Package (and Capture Action)