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RPA Developer

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**Objectives:**

*   Provide a possibility to launch highly customizable forms by receiving some sort of Markup file.
*   Allow the developer to dynamically initialize the values of the fields inside the form, capture user input and use it inside workflows.
*   Find a way for users to globally customize and design the workflow through a StyleSheet (basically, like a .css file for a HTML page)

**Technical Approach:**

  

All objectives above are achieved by leveraging the features of the **Windows Presentation Foundation** framework. This way, we can receive as input a custom XAML (or Json) mark-up from which we can generate a Form that we can further initialize with whatever data the developer passes to our custom activity. 

  

This means that, inside our forms, we can use any type of UI element (also called **controls**) that we could normally use in a standard WPF form. Since the WPF library is quite extensive and provides plenty of controls and configuration options, we can make sure that the users of this custom activity are provided with all the flexibility and customization possibilities they need.

Basically, the custom activity is designed to receive a XAML file with a Grid control as its parent element which will contain all the controls of our current page. This mark-up is passed to a WPF window and the form gets launched. The developer can optionally pass a XAML file which contains a **ResourceDictionary** control. This control can contain styles which will be applied to the entire form.

  

In order to enhance the number of possible elements in our forms, we also include the **Extended WPF Toolkit** in this package. Therefore, all controls in this library can be used in our forms.

  

This package provides some minimal visual enhancements in addition to the standard WPF look. This is done by using the **MetroLight theme.**

  

**For more details, please see the attached documentation.**

  

More information about this approach can be found here:

*   WPF Framework: [https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/wpf/?view=netdesktop-7.0](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/wpf/)
*   Metro Light: [https://www.nuget.org/packages/Infragistics.Themes.MetroLight.Wpf/](https://www.nuget.org/packages/Infragistics.Themes.MetroLight.Wpf/)
*   Extended WPF Toolkit:  [https://github.com/xceedsoftware/wpftoolkit](https://github.com/xceedsoftware/wpftoolkit)

Custom activity that accepts XAML mark-up for WPF forms and intialization data for the form. Launches the form on the screen, where the user can complete it.

**Objectives:**

*   Providing a robust and facile manner of processing very large Excel files in the background and without relying on COM Interop.
*   The implementation of these custom activities will give the user the last row of the Excel file (extremely useful when trying to process a file in chunks). Currently trying to read a file in chunks is impossible without knowing the number of rows and columns in the sheet.
*   The implementation of an Application Scope activity that will allow the grouping of the custom activities in this package.
*   Providing activities that are similar in structure and type of parameters to the current Excel application.

**Observation and limitations:**

  
The activity will not keep track of the formats used to display values in the Excel application. For example, a cell with a value of 43006 formatted as date will be displayed as 9/28/2017 in Excel, but this activity will still retrieve it as 43006.  

Files in which the row starts with the index 0 (this index can be found in the XML mark-up of the row) will not be processed. The row number also needs to be under 1048576 (the maximum number of rows in an Excel Sheet). If a row number outside of this interval is found, the application will throw an exception. This limitation is also valid for the Read Range in the Workbook activities package.  

This package is not compatible with .xls files or .csv files. Only .xlsx files can be read with this activity. Reading Large XLS files can be done in conjunction with the Conversions Package, which will convert the file to an .xlsx file, thus making it compatible with this package.  

Some very minor differences when deciding where a range ends between the standard Excel processing activities and this one.

  

**Technical Approach:**  

The files will be processed in the background using the Open XML SDK library and the SAX (Simple API for XML) approach which instead of reading the entire document and exposing its DOM, will independently read the XML files that comprise the Excel document.

  

**Read Range**

  

**Principles**

  

This custom activity reads a Range of cells from an Excel Sheet. It achieves its goal by using the Open XML SDK framework and the OpenXmlReader class to parse the File in a SAX like approach. To get the number of rows, we simply parse the file and count the rows.  

The custom activity is created by simply inheriting the CodeActivity class from the Windows Workflow Foundation framework. We define the logic of the function by implementing the Execute method and we define the input and output of the activity by fields of the InArgument and OutArgument types.  

This activity can only be placed inside a XL Excel Application Scope activity (not necessarily directly inside, but one of its parents must be the XL Excel Application Scope).

An activity pack used to read and process extra large Excel files.

This framework is meant to be used as an attended automation framework that allows the grouping of multiple processes (referred to as use cases) into one and that enhances the interaction between the user and the attended robot.

**How To Use**

The interface has two components:

1.  A **Dashboard** in which all the current processes (use-cases) supported by the robot are displayed and where the user can select the use-case about to be executed
2.  An **ActionBar** that appears once a use-case is selected and displays all its steps, allowing the user to control the flow of execution 

**Prerequisites**

In order for you to be able to use this framework, you need to make sure the following prerequisites are met:

1.  Make sure the port **49215** is available for the framework to use, otherwise, the communication between the HTML pages and the robot process won't work.
2.  The Robot must have access to create a sub-folder in the **/Documents** folder of the current windows user.
3.  In order to use the HTML/CSS/Js files saved locally in the project folder, you enable the **Allow active content to run in files on My Computer** Internet Option enabled (otherwise, move the HTML folder on a folder/network drive and change the paths in the Config.json):

  

The framework comes out of the box with 4 demo use cases, you can find more about them in the examples inside the documentation.

For the first demo use case, you will need the ExpenseIt application (also used in the academy courses). You can download it from here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1T1OQ7zykNsauoPNL3xfkdqRx5zR5GGB-

  

In order to change the skin of the Framework to the alternative presented in the screenshots, extract the files inside the **\\HTML\\reskin1.zip** and using the files inside, overwrite the files inside the **\\HTML** folder.

  

For any questions please also contact [Emilian Budeanu](https://connect.uipath.com/profile/emilian-budeanu) and [Stefan Reutter](https://connect.uipath.com/profile/stefan-reutter).

Also, a big thank you to [Marian Petrea](https://connect.uipath.com/profile/marian-petrea) for the awesome job he did with the reskin alternative!

An attended automation framework that enhances the interaction between the user and the robot

Overview

This framework is meant to be used as an attended automation framework that allows the grouping of multiple processes (referred to as use cases) into one and that enhances the interaction between the user and the attended robot.

**How To Use**

The interface has two components:

1.  A **Dashboard** in which all the current processes (use-cases) supported by the robot are displayed and where the user can select the use-case about to be executed
2.  An **ActionBar** that appears once a use-case is selected and displays all its steps, allowing the user to control the flow of execution

**Prerequisites**

In order for you to be able to use this framework, you need to make sure the following prerequisites are met:

1.  Make sure the port **49215** is available for the framework to use, otherwise, the communication between the HTML pages and the robot process won't work.
2.  The Robot must have access to create a sub-folder in the **/Documents** folder of the current windows user.
3.  In order to use the HTML/CSS/Js files saved locally in the project folder, you enable the **Allow active content to run in files on My Computer** Internet Option enabled (otherwise, move the HTML folder on a folder/network drive and change the paths in the Config.json):

The framework comes out of the box with 4 demo use cases, you can find more about them in the examples inside the documentation.

For the first demo use case, you will need the ExpenseIt application (also used in the academy courses). You can download it from here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1T1OQ7zykNsauoPNL3xfkdqRx5zR5GGB-

In order to change the skin of the Framework to the alternative presented in the screenshots, extract the files inside the **\\HTML\\reskin1.zip** and using the files inside, overwrite the files inside the **\\HTML** folder.

For any questions please also contact [Emilian Budeanu](https://connect.uipath.com/profile/emilian-budeanu) and [Stefan Reutter](https://connect.uipath.com/profile/stefan-reutter).

Also, a big thank you to [Marian Petrea](https://connect.uipath.com/profile/marian-petrea) for the awesome job he did with the reskin alternative!

An activities pack that converts files between various formats.

  

It receives as parameters the file path of the original file, the path of the folder where the new file should be created and the name of the new converted file.

  

Currently, the package contains the following activities:

*   Convert DOC to DOCX
*   Convert DOCX to DOC
*   Convert Word to PDF
*   Convert XLS to XLSX
*   Convert XLSX to XLS

**Input**

*   **FilePath(string)** **\-** path of the file that we're going to convert.
*   **Directory To Save In(string**) **\-** path of the folder where we're going to save the new file.
*   **New File Name(string)** **\-** the name of the newly created file.

**Output**

*   **Resulting FilePath (string)** **\-** file path of the newly created file.

**How To Use**

Example - Convert XLS to XLSX:

First, we input the full file path for the .xls file, we specify the destination folder and the name of the new file.

Then, we proceed to read and process the file as normal.

The resulting file will be "C:\\UiPath\\ResultXLSX.xslx".

  

**Observation and limitations:**

*   Because of the usage of COM Interop, it means that this activity requires that the Office application is installed to successfully convert the file.
*   It is possible that converting XLS and/or Word files will not work for extremely large files.

This custom activity converts Excel and Word files using the COM Interop library.

This is an attended automation activity that offers the possibility to create a highly advanced, customizable and non-blocking HTML and JS form that interacts continuously with the robot while it continues to execute instructions with every data sent to it.

  

Main features:

\- non-blocking form (while the form is displayed, the robot can execute other activities in parallel)

\- 2 way communication between robot and form (form can send back data to the robot and viceversa)

\- each form event can trigger the invocation of UiPath code

\- customizable screen position/height/width/ form Icon/top-bar

  

**It is higly recommended that you check the 2 samples and the documentation attached before you start developing.**

Powerful and customizable HTML/JS form creator

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