☃️ Advent Challenge #1

News Challenges
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Advent challenge #1 (Deadline 3rd of December 2020)

To find out more about December challenges, see here.

:santa_claus: Santa had a rough 2019 christmas and therefore slept until now, where he woke up in Brisbane. He found his reindeer sleigh and is about to take off to his first destination: Bangkok, where he will pick up his assistant Jingle-Bell :santa_claus:

:christmas_tree: :christmas_tree: Santas problem: :christmas_tree: :christmas_tree:
His sleigh is very prone to wind. Therefore he needs to know the exact speed of wind on key points on his journey to Bangkok :dashing_away:

Key Points

:office_building: Brisbane

:office_building: Port Douglas

:office_building: Makassar

:office_building: Palembang

:office_building: Kuala Lumpur

:office_building: Bangkok

Beginners Advent Challenge #1

  • Describe how you will find the wind speed (m/s) of the above 6 cities using UiPath. The full solution also describes, how the wind speed will get saved.

  • Bonus: The best descriptions will receive additional stars. Be as creative as you can, when you help Santa (you can add pictures, workflows etc.) :slight_smile:

Advanced Advent Challenge #1

  • Santa needs you to use the endpoint: https://vejr.eu/api.php?location=London&degree=C in order to be as sure as possible, when we pick up the wind speed (m/s). Try the link with a different city to inspect the syntax.

  • Describe your solution. Add creative/best practice to it to score extra stars.

  • The solution must include the UiPath activity “HTTP Request” (Get).

Remember

  • You can enter both the Beginner and Advanced challenge (5 stars + 5 stars = 10 stars). In order to receive the extra stars, please specify which category, you want to be in (you can’t change it later, so be sure to pick advanced, if you are advanced - hint hint: It will be a very good idea!) :smiley:

  • Adding pictures to your solution is great, when you want to describe and document it to Santa.

:timer_clock: Deadline
Submissions must be posted in this thread no later than the 2020-12-03T22:59:00Z.

4

Santa can do all by himself, but this year THOR :hammer: is going to help Santa out! Starting with finding him a windy route since Santa needs good airflow (thick red jacket Santa needs to wear).

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Looks like THOR did it, he suggests that Santa should first visit Brisbane, Australia
However, the wind speeds are not reported so well for the other parts of the world today. Only Australia has some wind. May be he will have better conditions going forward. In addition, Santa gets to start at a cooler place today - Brisbane which is only 23 degrees tonight.

THOR presents this CSV report to Santa. Santa specifically asked for CSV format.
Location,Temperature,SkyText,Humidity,WindText
“Brisbane, Australien”,23,Skyet,70,2 m/s Syd
“Port Douglas, Australien”,26,Mest skyet,80,5 m/s Sydøst
“Makassar, Indonesien”,25,Tordenvejr,94,0 m/s
“Palembang, Indonesien”,26,Let regn,93,0 m/s
“Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia”,27,Regnbyger,84,0 m/s Nordvest
“Bangkok, Thailand”,26,Mest klart,66,0 m/s

THOR also found out that the weather search endpoint he used seems to be in Danish, men Santa forstår dansk godt!

Santa looks at this report and is quite surprised at the suggested route. Do you mean I have to wait for better wind conditions? That’s a lot of time to travel in Australia. Are you sure my, Son?

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I guess, Santa has to do what he does best, Travel. The Elf’s have already started packing!
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Anyways, Santa asked me to submit this as a solution with detailed annotations for Advanced Advent Challenge #1
GET_me_weather_report_THOR.xaml (19.8 KB)

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Haha - quality :grinning:

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category: Advanced

Dear Santa,

I’ve received your letter in which you are asking for help in order to get wind informations!
You’re in luck, since this kind of task can be easily automated with UiPath!

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I’ve also received the Excel you attached to the letter, you can give this to the robot in order to retrieve the informations you want!
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Hard to believe, right?!

With that, the robot can extract informations from the table and, for every City, ask to a little Danish friend to GET the wind informations, as fast as HTTP goes!

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But sometimes the Request can be little problematic, so it’s better to try and catch some errors, and if occurs go on with the other cities!
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So now we have the informations, and with the help of JSONta Claus we can extract the wind status!
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But wait… the little Danish friend gave us informations…in Danish!!
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And I know for sure that Rudolph and Blitzen can’t read Danish…
So the little robot decided to switch his abilities in case it will be more helpful
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and to transform the direction in… arrows!
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So now you have your Excel filled with Wind speed and direction, pretty nice!

Wait, what? you don’t believe it’s possible?
Well… dear Santa, you should believe in anything, even if you can’t see it…
But for now, I will show you anyway!
https://youtu.be/qnxyDp79ctk

Happy automation,…and Drive safe!
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Main.xaml (34.0 KB)

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Super creative :ok_hand: :clap:

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@jeevith - Love the Marvel Cinematic Universe crossover with Thor!

@stefano_negro - Love the extra effort with the holiday spirit messages!

Great work to kick off the Advent Challenges! :partying_face:

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I have to admit the Christmas gift was quite wonderful…
Being a newbie I had to research a bit for this one.
My initial approach was to fetch the data using scraping(Now hold on - i’m new to UiPath)…
Instead what I have done feels right - to quote Chandler Bing - “Think of it as the thing that has been missing from…” my code.
Glad to be part of this advent…looking out for more… lots of learning… I think Santa would be happy with the solution :wink:

WeatherMapAPI - Fetch Windspeed.xaml (9.7 KB)

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@stefano_negro
Haha, what an awesome post. Forms and a great story. Out of my own curiosity: How do you map the wind integers to the arrows? Looking at both yours and @jeevith xaml solutions could definately teach a UiPath newcomer a lot.

@Indranil_Nag
Welcome to the Forum - a very nice first post :blush: What is the Assign (urlString) doing? Santa should be very happy :mrs_claus:

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@stefano_negro I have question about package.
What packages you use?

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@AndersJensen Thanks! I used an array with the ASCII symbols of the arrows stored, and in the switch condition I will retrieve them based on the direction from the GET.

@fairymemay these are the packages used
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Hi Santa :santa:,

I am here to help you and your reindeer sleigh :deer: in picking up Jingle-Bell :confetti_ball:.
All you need is to give me your key points, I will give you report in few seconds.
Please check out the solution and also final handy printable sheet.

WindSpeedReport.zip (2.7 MB)
WindSpeedReport.pdf (164.1 KB)

Looking forward to help you again.

Thanks,
Olaf - The SantaBOT :snowman_with_snow:

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Well, we don’t really need that… that was a part of my master plan that never came to reality. :new_moon_with_face:
Its nice to be part of the family… Happy Holidays ! :partying_face:

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Good Luck everyone!
I will be more creative next time :wink:

Before-After
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Workflow
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AdventChallenge1.zip (103.0 KB)

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Beginners Advent Challenge #1

Santa is RPA enthusiastic and would like to determine the wind speeds of his key points himself. His programming elves should not help him. An API call is much too simple. An ambitious challenge to automate a web UI robust and reliable. So he automates the UI of his Danish weather forecast. Why Danish :denmark: he asks himself, I come from Finland :finland:. Anyway, here is his attempt.

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AdventChallenge1.zip (198.2 KB)

  1. Create a CSV file with the key points.
  2. Load the CSV file.
  3. Open Danish weather forecast in the browser.
  4. Loop over the CSV and read the key points.
  5. Enter the key points into the field of the weather forecast.
  6. Read the results.
  7. Extract the wind speed from the result.
  8. Write the wind speed into the CSV file.

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With a tailwind the reindeers need less food or I can eat a little more, he said to himself and smiled. :grinning:

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Advanced Advent Challenge #1

Santa orders his shower power programming elf to come. “Hey” he says, “I need the wind speeds of my key points via the API of the Danish weather forecast”. “This is a very simple thing”, the elf replies. With an HTTP request in a loop that processes a CSV file it is quickly realized. No sooner said than done.

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AdventChallenge1Advanced.zip (199.3 KB)

Afterwards they sit together at the fireplace and drink Glögg. A call via an API, they think, is much easier to realize than via the UI. No RPA elf (and of course Citizen Developer) should have concerns to use APIs. This can sometimes lead to success faster than trying to automate exclusively via the UI. Satisfied they look at each other and wait for the next advent challenge.

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Advanced Advent Challenge #1

AdventChallenge1.zip (5.9 KB)

The Rock is cooking dinner for the people for the holidays!

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When suddenly Santa Messaged him that he needs his help to get the wind directions.

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The rock was pissed because he is about to taste the food he was Cooking (get it?)
So he raised his eyebrows

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Then santa said. Dwayne, remember, you are currently on my good boy list. i dont want to add you to the naughty ones

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Then he realized he was dreaming of the WWE Championship Belt and wished for Santa to let him win.

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So he hurriedly checked for the wind speed of each country.

finally, since Santa is on a rush, instead of sending an email. He just sent the values of the wind direction via SMS.

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Then, smelled that the food he was cooking was burning…

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But then suddenly he realized that he was able to help Santa by using UiPath and Using API calls as well as using Twilio to send Santa his requests

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The smell of Victory :smiley: ;D ;D ;D

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Advanced Advent Challenge #1

Dear Santa,

I hope you’re doing great in this special year !

I had your message asking me to help you in your journey and I in turn asked UiPath for help to:

  1. Get the cities of your journey using UiPath Excel activities

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  1. Get cities wind information using UiPath Web activities

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  1. Generate your report using UiPath Presentation activities

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I noted that the Excel file you sent is well formatted, thank you for that. I fed my elf-bot with, so that he knows for which cities you want wind information from.

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After getting information from a Danish website, my elf-bot translated it in English so that you can understand in which side the wind is blowing…

Eventually, you’ll receive a PDF file listing the cities in your journey as well as wind information as requested (note : my elf-bot added local temperature as extra info for you to anticipate your clothing) .

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Don’t forget to drop by my house for my gifts :slight_smile:
Have a nice journey !

Advent_challenge_1.zip (334.4 KB)

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Excellent !!!

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(Advanced Advent Challenge #1)

Dear Santa,

I made it as background process for you who are busy.
You can check information for wind on UiPath Assistant during other automation process keep running.

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In addition, it outputs csv files as the following.

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AdventChallenge1.zip (3.9 KB)

Have a safe trip!

Regards,