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302 Topics
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Integrating Apple’s Siri with Automation 360

This tutorial is a guest post from A-lister, Sr. RPA Consultant & Solutions Architect, and You Tuber Azhar Hossain. Azhar is a creative problem solver and someone with a genuine passion for tech & automation. He was generous enough to create this really fun Siri & Automation Anywhere integration video to share with the Automation Anywhere developer community as a part of #BotGames. If you have an idea for a blog post or tutorial that you think would benefit the Automation Anywhere developer community, let us know at developer@automationanywhere.com.  Bots are awesome. They enable individuals and organizations to automate repetitive, mundane, and mind-numbing work. Most commonly though, people are running their bots using basic schedules or directory-watching triggers. In this tutorial, we want to explore how users can interface with Siri to trigger bots on an unattended bot runner...and while triggering itself is cool, A-Lister Azhar Hossain takes things even further by als

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Bot Store Spotlight - JSON Object Manager Package

 The JSON Object Manager Package is one of the most popular packages in Automation Anywhere's Bot Store. This package enables developers to retrieve data from the JSON response of a REST web service call, read JSON config files, get the length of an array object within a JSON, or update JSON values based on the corresponding key. Here are the JSON files referenced in the video: Simple JSON file Sentiment Analysis Response JSON file Video Recap: Initialize the SessionTo use different actions in the package, first, a session must be initialized so that you can start using the other actions in the package. This initialization should be done with the entire JSON object - which will be used for extracting/updating data in the remaining package actions. This action also validates that the JSON is valid and will set it up for further actions to parse the JSON object. Query the JSONWith this action, users can retrieve the value corresponding to a key. For example, if phoneNumbers is an array,

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Bot Store Spotlight - Web Automation Package

 Bot Store Spotlight - Web Automation Package The Web Automation Package is one of the most popular packages in Automation Anywhere's Bot Store. This package enables developers to automate web interfaces by leveraging Selenium. It supports Chrome and Edge browser and uses the Open Source ChromeDriver and EdgeDriver under the hood. This package could be used as an alternative to the Recorder package. Using the Web Automation Package, you can use JavaScript to interact with various objects in the web interface. Setup: Here are the links to download ChromeDriver and EdgeDriver. The package itself has the 92.x drivers packaged natively, but if you run into issues - you can try downloading these drivers manually and reference their location either on the Control Room or on the local Bot Runner/development machine. In this video, we have discussed how you can use the Web Automation package to solve the Bot Wars challenge page for the first week of August. We have covered the details about ho

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1 year ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Bot Lifecycle Management in Automation 360

This tutorial is a guest post from our Most Valuable Pathfinder Theertha K S, Technical Manager at Mindtree Limited. If you have an idea for a blog post or tutorial that you think would benefit the Automation Anywhere developer community, let us know at developer@automationanywhere.com.  Automation Anywhere platform supports separate development, testing, acceptance, and production environments for bots—and their dependencies. Bot Life Cycle Management (BLM) provides a framework for continuous testing and deployment of bots and dependencies in separate software development life cycle (SDLC) environments, allowing bots to seamlessly transition between lifecycle stages defined by the organization before they are released into production.Bot code files and their dependencies can be exported as a single package from one Control Room and imported into another Control Room. This export and import of files can be done in 2 possible ways:Manual mode Automated mode Before we learn how to do it

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1 month ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Meetup Recap: Intelligent Document Processing with IQ Bot

During the virtual meetup hosted on July 28th, we discussed about what is Intelligent Document Processing and the why it is important for almost every organization to succeed in their digital transformation journey and how IQ Bot can help in this journey.As many of you know, IQ Bot is Automation Anywhere’s AI-powered data extraction automation that works across many complex document types and a wide variety of formats. IQ Bot blends multiple artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, such as computer vision, machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP), to glean relevant information from documents, add structure to the data, and deliver the results to multiple applications.Combined with Robotic Process Automation (RPA), IQ Bot enables banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) companies and a host of other industries to take advantage of intelligent document processing (IDP) to extract valuable data and streamline operations. And talking about the most interesting par

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Developer Perspectives: IQ Bot Best Practices

This is a guest post from Prasad Krishna from HTC Global Services. Prasad is a passionate RPA developer with 4+ years of development experience using Automation Anywhere. In his free time, he enjoys playing music, watching cricket, documentaries, and action-thriller movies. When he’s not building bots, you can find Prasad on Linkedin.  Author and speaker Tony Robbins was once quoted as saying "Success Leaves Clues". While Robbins was primarily referring to the study of successful and happy individuals that we may come across in our personal and professional lives to understand their habits and techniques, his statement is also applicable to the development and implementation of automation solutions. What do successful intelligent document processing (IDP) implementations have in common? How can you take the most optimal path to recognizing our target ROI by learning from the lessons, challenges, and mistakes of others?  In this blog post, I want to dive into some of the key things to "

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Auto-update Exchange Rates with Automation 360

This tutorial is a guest post from Ashwin A.K from Speridian Technologies  - a global business and technology solutions provider. Speridian's business and technology experts help clients modernize their businesses through Digital Transformation. Exchange rates are subject to continuous fluctuation, hence require constant updating. Countless hours are spent each day by our finance team on this mundane task alone, which could have been utilized for activities that actually require their creative intelligence. In this tutorial, let's see how we can solve this with RPA. Setting The foundation for our problem statement Each day, our finance team manually logs into a designated banking portal where they will find the latest Euro exchange rates for a set of currencies, the company is interested in maintaining. The rates from the previous day are extracted using APIs and updated before pushing it back into the company’s database. Once that is done, the next task is to perform data manipulation

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Why Microservices Matter

One of the technological advancements that Automation Anywhere touts is that we have re-written our entire Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform to be cloud-native and designed specifically with scalability in mind using a microservices architecture. For many businesses, when it comes to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) the “how” is often not as important as the “what”. We believe, however, that microservices represent a key differentiator in product design - enough, in fact, that organizations should care that they are investing in a platform leveraging this scalable, fault-tolerant design model. What are Microservices? Microservices - also known as microservices architecture - represent an approach to building software that prioritizes autonomy between system components. The key benefit of this design is that it facilitates the extensibility of the system without impacting the running environment. That is, components of the platform can be added or changed without requiring updates t

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Integrating with Google BigQuery

 Integrating with Google BigQuery The Automation 360 .21 release is out. It brings with it a host of new/interesting updates for developers - from some visual updates in regards to the way that Control Room looks to updates to various packages to improve the bot building experience for developers. One package in particular that saw some updates in this release was the Database package - and most specifically - with its extended ODBC driver support to now include connection capabilities to data warehouses like Google BigQuery and Snowflake (among others). To celebrate these updates, we've put together a tutorial on how Google BigQuery can be integrated with an Automation 360 bot in the .21 release. Check out the video above and some of the highlights below to learn more about BigQuery and establishing a connection from Automation 360. What is Google BigQuery? Google BigQuery is a data warehouse solution available from within Google Cloud. BigQuery is a serverless, scalable, multi-cloud

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Parsing XML response from SAP RFC API (SAP access not required to follow this tutorial)

Tutorial by Sikha Poyyil, Partner Solution Engineer, Automation Anywhere. Note: We do understand that a lot of us do not have access to SAP systems, but that doesn't limit us from trying out this tutorial. To keep this tutorial simple, we have simulated the SAP API response using a test endpoint that sends the response back in XML format just like how a real SAP API would do. In this tutorial, we will understand how to build an Automation 360 bot to parse the XML response received from the SAP RFC API. For background, while working with SAP systems, the ability to call remote functions is provided by the Remote Function Call (RFC) interface and we can communicate from external systems (like the RPA bot in this case) using the RFC API. Let’s divide the steps into 4 sections and here are the specifics to build this bot. Section 1: Execute a REST API call and establish a session to use the XML operations using the XML package. To execute a REST API call, use the action REST Web Services →

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
A Customer Perspective: Subtasks & Steps in Automation 360

This article is part of a series authored by Zeth Baker previously from Republic Airways shares their experience and decision to migrate to Automation 360. Should your organization be on the fence about upgrading from v10/v11, hearing from customers in their own words can be a great way to see yourself in their story. In this article, he’s back to talk about how Subtasks and Steps have improved their automation development experience. In mid to late 2020- Automation Anywhere’s developer evangelist, Micah Smith, was hard at work trying to convince me to give A2019/Automation 360 a try again after I’d had some frustrating A2019 experiences upon initial release. He’d explained that, as a fellow v11 devotee, he was now doing all of his automation development in what was then A2019 (now called Automation 360) even though he had the choice to develop on either v11 or A2019/Automation 360. Admittedly, I was very hesitant and dragged my feet a little… he was right, the platform had come a long

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Adding Microsoft Teams Notifications into a Bot Build

This tutorial is a guest post from Santosh Kumar Sabat from Giant Eagle  - a grocery store and pharmacy chain in the United States.   Bots that can automate business processes clearly add immense value to organizations looking for a productivity boost. For many organizations, however, the robotic process automation happens invisibly to operational staff who may benefit from additional details around the status of bot executions, in addition to processing details like number of tasks completed or confirmation numbers. In order to provide this additional visibility to support staff, operational staff, and CoE leads - bots can be integrated with Microsoft Teams notifications to update different Teams channels when certain processing events occur. In this tutorial, we'll take a look at how Microsoft Teams channel notifications can be sent directly from within a bot. Launch Microsoft Teams if it isn't already opened Select a channel that you're a member of Channels are dedicated section

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1 year ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Building Your First Automation 360 Bot

 Tutorial: Building Your First Automation 360 Bot Automation 360 brings with it the ability for anyone to create and run their own bots.  If you're brand new to the concept of robotic process automation (RPA) and looking for a place to get started - this is a perfect place to start. In this tutorial, we'll be building a bot to automate logging in to a website. We'll look at how the bot can be built out and tested, and even look at an alternative building approach that enables users to build out repeatable actions very quickly.Resources to Follow AlongLogin Tutorial Page: https://pathfinder.automationanywhere.com/challenges/AutomationAnywhereLabs-Login.htmlMachine Setup Video Referenced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rvhln_RFysPre-Work: Machine SetupIf you're brand new to Automation Anywhere, there are a couple of steps you'll need to follow to properly get set up:Unless you already have access to an Automation 360 environment, you'll want to be sure to register for Automation Anywhe

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
How to Remove Blank Rows from the current Worksheet

In this tutorial, we will learn how to remove blank rows from the current worksheet to cover the following 3 scenarios: Delete all empty rows Delete empty rows within a specific row range Delete empty rows using the cell address To use the actions in Excel advanced package, use the following sequence. Open the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that you want to use to automate the Microsoft Excel-related tasks. Use the Open action to open the spreadsheet and select the required input file. Select the checkbox ‘Sheet contains a header’. Header is considered as Row 1 and the data starts from Row 2. Use ‘Remove blank Rows’, we will discuss about the configurations in the different scenarios below. As the last step, close the spreadsheet using the Close action and ensure you check the checkbox 'Save changes when closing file' so that all the changes are saved before closing the spreadsheet You can download the Employees List Excel spreadsheet in the attachments below.  Scen

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Top 5 New Features in the Automation 360 .20 Release

  The product and development teams at Automation Anywhere have been on a roll with new features and updates coming out with each release. In this post, we'll dive into some of the most popular and most requested features that were newly added with .20 (build 8846).  Control Room Switching If you're regularly developing and testing bots, you'll immediately recognize the benefits of this one. The .20 release includes the ability to enable devices to be switched between Control Rooms. SUPER helpful if you're frequently developing and testing in multiple environments and finding yourself needing to delete temp files or do a full uninstall/reinstall every time you swap. To turn on this functionality: Log in as an Admin, and this setting is in Settings > Devices> General. Tip: Be sure that this is enabled on all Automation 360 Control Rooms that you switch between...otherwise you'll still be prompted to uninstall/reinstall on a CR that doesn't have this capability enabled. Dis

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Top 10 Moments from Imagine 2021

Imagine Digital is a 3-day event with Automation Anywhere leaders, customers, and partners where you can see customer/Automation Anywhere led demos, hear about customer success stories, and get hands-on with our products in the day-3 tech tracks. There is a TON of great content presented, and lots of lessons to be learned. To help our developer portal readers get the most out of the information shared at Imagine Digital, we're highlighting the top 10 moments from Imagine 2021 so you can quickly jump to the sessions that can add the most value for you and your organization.  GM Financial Botathon Day 1 of Imagine started off quite strong and included an interesting interview with Craig Davenport, Senior Vice President of International Operations IT & Corporate Systems from GM Financial. In the interview, Craig and Automation Anywhere CEO, Mihir Shukla, discussed how many organizations struggle with getting employees on board with bot building and democratizing RPA capabilities acros

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Imagine 2021 Tech Track Resources

Automation Anywhere's Imagine is a three-day livestream and on-demand cloud RPA event featuring RPA thought leadership, solution spotlights, customer stories, and product demos. Whether you were able to join live or are were watching on-demand/replay - the third day featured several Tech-Tracks - where Automation Anywhere employees presented technical demos, hands-on sessions, and developer-led tutorials.In an effort to make those sessions feel a bit more tangible, we've collected the source-code/demo-code for several of those sessions so that attendees can get hands-on with the content - replicating those same bots in Community Edition or within their own environment. Where applicable, the referenced repo locations contain either demo code that you can download, install in your Control Room, and start playing with right away, or tutorial resources - which include any setup materials you made need as well as the finished product - so you have something to check against if you get stuck

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Imagine Digital: Tech Track Breakdown

Imagine Tech Track BreakdownAutomation Anywhere's annual Imagine conference is going fully digital this year on May 11-13th. The event is free to register/attended and is 3 days of robotic process automation thought leadership, customer stories, product deep dives, and best practices. Day 3 (May 13th) is the Tech Track - a day full of demos, tutorials, and engaging experiences for those who are interested in getting hands-on with Automation 360.For some insight into the day 3 content, we're breaking down the content based on areas of interest.I’m new to Automation Anywhere and not sure where to start?Getting Ready to Get Hands-OnGet registered for Automation Anywhere's Community Edition, get your machine setup, and validate your configuration with a sample bot run. This session is intended to be the pre-work that individuals can follow along with ahead of day 3 so they can hit the ground running with some of the tutorials and replicating any demos. Building Your First BotsIf you're new

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
A Customer Perspective: Automation 360 Top Features - Variables

This article is the third Developer Portal blog post authored by Zeth Baker previously from Republic Airways, and the first in a mini-series of Automation 360 Top Features documenting Republic Airway's perspectives on Automation 360 features. If you’ve read any of this series of articles or briefly looked into upgrading to Automation 360, you’re probably wondering is there really a benefit to upgrading or wondering if you should continue to build in v11 until its end-of-life date (RIP v11). Well then, this article might just be perfect for you - speaking as a developer and someone who went through this exact same thought process. From the time I first saw the web-based version of Automation 360 back at the Imagine 2019 conference in New York, I was excited and curious for what was to come. Then – to be perfectly honest - I got my hands on a beta version in late 2019 and mostly gave up on touching it for over a year due to how long the bot launcher was taking, bot execution times, and h

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Imagine 2021 Top Sessions for Developers

Imagine 2021 Top Sessions for DevelopersIf you've previously attended Automation Anywhere Imagine-virtual or any of the Automation Anywhere in-person Imagine events (before COVID) - then you know that it's 3 days packed full of presentations from robotic process automation thought leaders, Automation Anywhere partners, product teams, as well as product demos and tutorials.This year, Imagine will be taking place virtually May 11-13 (registration for the virtual Imagine event is free!). And while there are many excellent sessions spread out across the 3-day event, we wanted to call out a few that may be of particular interest to the Automation Anywhere developer community to keep an eye out for. Don't limit yourself to only these sessions, but for sure check add the following sessions to your schedule:Day 1: Republic Airways Soars to Efficiency with Automation 360CoE Lead and A-Lister, Zeth Baker, takes attendees through the Republic Airway's journey migrating from Automation Anywhere v1

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
How to Use the Actions in the DLL Package

In this exercise, we will learn how to use the actions in the DLL package. The DLL package uses a .dll file as reference and calls functions from the bot. The DLL package supports only DLLs written in C#.To learn about the different actions in this package, let’s consider a use case to get the current price of Bitcoin in USD and EUR. For this exercise, we will use a DLL (BitcoinPrice.dll) that retrieves the current Bitcoin price through a REST API call and uses a dependent DLL RestSharp.dll to perform the REST calls.Dependency for BitcoinPrice.dll: Restsharp DLL (Source: RestSharp) - This is a simple REST and HTTP API Client.You can download the DLLs (BitcoinPrice.dll and RestSharp.dll along with the code to build BitcoinPrice.dll in Visual Studio) used in this exercise from Automation Anywhere GitHub Repo.In this exercise, we will not focus on how to build this DLL, however, if you wish to build it yourself with Visual Studio, please use the project type Class Library (.Net framework)

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Tutorial: Building An Automation 360 Package

Tutorial: Building An Automation 360 PackageAutomation 360 brings with it the ability for developers to create, publish, and share their own custom packages. For those not familiar with the Automation Anywhere platform, a package is a collection of configurable actions that can be used as the building block of bots. Out of the box, Automation 360 includes hundreds of actions contained within 70+ packages. In addition to those packages which ship with the product, the Automation Anywhere Bot Store makes 50+ additional packages available that are all free to download and use within your Automation 360 control room. Essentially these packages form the tools of the proverbial toolbelt that an RPA developer has at their disposal when building bots. But what if I want to integrate with an application that is native to my organization? Or an application that is not represented in the default package set or via Bot Store? Fortunately, the Automation 360 Package SDK provides the framework for d

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1 year ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Get to Know Your Datatypes: Dictionary Variable

 A dictionary is a data type available in Automation 360 that enables developers to store, retrieve, and iterate through key-value data pairings. Dictionaries can be very helpful in reducing the number of variables that need to be created, as a single dictionary value can hold a large amount of data that can be referenced in most all bot actions. In this session, we'll seek to understand how a dictionary variable can be created in Automation 360, how data can be stored in them, and how we can retrieve data within other actions. Dictionary Creation Dictionaries in Automation 360 are created in the same way other variables are created - by clicking on on the '+' sign in the variables pane of the developer interface. Unique to dictionaries, however, is that a user can define a subtype for the dictionary - to say that the values stored in this dictionary will always be of this particular subtype. In the video, the subtype is left as a string, but alternatively, boolean, number, or any co

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Automation 360 Navigation Updates

Hello from the User Experience team at Automation Anywhere! Our goal is to streamline your work by making Automation Anywhere products more intuitive through human-centered design. Today we’re excited to share an upcoming change to the Automation 360 product navigation.We know many of you spend hours a day in various parts of Automation 360. In talking with you we noticed some ways we can make your life easier by organizing the menu based on features you use together or need to interact with frequently. Based on those observations and interviews with users like you, we’re excited to announce updates to the product navigation that we believe will make your tasks around RPA more efficient.We also know you may have become used to a certain navigation system; therefore, we want to share the details of the updates early so you know what’s ahead. It may take a few days to get used to the new navigation, so we ask for your patience and hope that soon you’ll view the updates as improving your

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3 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Build Your First Package Livestream

 The developer community asked for it, so here it comes! On April 15th at 12pm EDT/9am PDT/930pm IST we'll be doing a livestream of package development, where Developer Evangelist Micah Smith will be taking viewers through the process of creating their first package.This tutorial will be a comprehensive guide to package development including:Starting with the Automation 360 Package SDK Customizing the build.gradle and package.template files and their impact on your package Using the locales JSON files for setting package, action, and configuration level values Understanding the different labels, names, icons, and descriptions that can be set for actions and their configuration files Writing a test class to validate your package code before compiling Compiling the package directly in the IntelliJ IDE Installing the custom package Validating the package in a botYou won't want to miss this session. So that you can hit the ground running with Micah when the session starts, be sure to go th

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3 years ago
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