Building a Modern Document Understanding Automation in Studio

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How do I build a Modern Document Understanding automation that will run with on-prem Studio/Robot and use a Modern Document Understanding Project on Automation Cloud?

Overview

There are two mutually exclusive UiPath™ Document Understanding implementation methodologies: Classic and Modern.

  1. The Classic methodology utilizes AI Center to build, train, and deploy ML Packages and Skills.
  2. The Modern methodology utilizes the Document Understanding service and handles the training and deployment behind the scenes.

At the time of the writing of this article, in order to migrate a Modern Document Understanding project from one tenant to another, the user must export the annotated data from the trained project. Then, create and retrain the new Modern Document Understanding project on the destination tenant.

Understanding Documentation Resources

The Document Understanding section of our documentation provides separate user guides for each methodology:

It's also important to routinely check the Release dropdown to be sure you're viewing the correct version of the documentation (Automation Cloud vs. Automation Suite)

Recommendations for Modern Document Understanding Projects

For building a Modern Document Understanding (DU) project, UiPath recommends the Document Understanding Process template. The main resources for learning more about that template are:

  1. Documentation
  2. UiPath Academy Course (free, time Burden: 3 hrs.)

Compatibility Options

If unfamiliar with Project Compatibility, you can read about setting the project compatibility here.

DU Template v24.10.x was the most recent version at the time this article was written. That version of the template defaults to creating a Cross-platform compatibility project which uses the UiPath.DocumentUnderstanding.Activities package. Users can choose to change it to Windows compatibility only at project creation time. This is done by selecting Windows from the Compatibility dropdown. The resulting project will use the UiPath.IntelligentOCR.Activities package instead of the UiPath.DocumentUnderstanding.Activities package.

Choosing Activity Packages

There are some important things to consider when selecting which packages to use to build your automation that aren't clear in our documentation.

  • UiPath.DocumentUnderstanding.Activities (Cross-platform)
    • Currently if you've migrated the project to another tenant, as mentioned in the Overview section, this package requires that Studio connect to new/destination tenant. Then the activities that are configured to reference the project in the previous tenant must be reconfigured to reference the project in the new tenant. Then that new Project version must then be published to the new destination tenant.

  • UiPath.IntelligentOCR.Activities (Windows)
    • Document Understanding Project Extractor and Document Understanding Project Classifier activities provide properties which enable the activities to connect with Modern DU projects that are running on a tenant in any Organization. They do this by authenticating with an Application ID and Application Secret from an External OAuth Application created in the target Organization.

Building a Workflow

UiPath Academy has a great course to help enable developers to build a Document Understanding workflow. Click here to access it.

After completing the trainings mentioned in this article along with reviewing these How-To documentation sections below, users will be well-equipped to build their workflow and leverage their Modern Document Understanding project using their on-prem UiPath Robot: