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 the process of creating their first bots to start their bot building journey.
With a foundational understanding of what RPA is and how bots can be used to solve problems, there is no better way to learn about creating bots than getting hands on. Using Automation 360’s cloud-based bot editor, lets start off by building a few simple bots before moving on to more complex use cases. Learning to become a good RPA developer is no different than learning any other skill – it takes observation, practice, and repetition to build the skillset needed to tackle more complex automation opportunities. Use the exercises that follow as exactly that – practice. Get your bots to work, understand why they work, and tweak them a bit to understand how changes impact the way that 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, developers will be asked to use an Automation Anywhere bot to fill data into fields.
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Pay close attention to the process followed in this video:
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Start with the requirements
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Break down the requirements into logical steps/groups – creating a flowchart as necessary to help visualize the flow
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Building an testing a bot to mimic that flowchart and ensuring the bot meets the needs of the initial requirements.
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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. Its not uncommon to take data from one system/application/page, possibly make some modications or validations on the data, then put it into another system/application/page.
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 with real pages to 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 to continue to build your knowledge in creating more dynamic automations.
