How to constantly monitor a field for changed in an app

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Hi,

I’ve just spent the week going through the “RPA Developer Foundation” Training course and just finished it today, so I thought I’d put a quit demo together and the first requirement that popped into my head was

“How do I constantly monitor a field (textbox or label for example) in an app and take an action when the value in the field changes.”

For example, assume an app just created a new order and it generated a new order number. How can I detect that a new order number was just generated?

I’ve been googling this for a while but I’m not finding anything relevant? Has anyone got any suggestions?

Is pressing a hotkey the only way to achieve this? I hope not.

Thanks.

T.

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Hi Tfirens,

First of all, congratulations on finishing your Foundation Training! It’s always great to see people following their interest in UiPath. :slight_smile:

Now, with regards to your question - we have a few different ways to look for changes, and I’ll explain a couple of your options.

  1. In the specific case you mention, the easiest option might be using the “Get Visible Text” activity on the field and storing the value you find, then checking back later and seeing if you get the same number.

  2. A similar feature we have that’s not for Fields/Labels in particular but which can be very useful is the Appear/Vanish activities. These let us take an action when we see an Element or Image appear or vanish. For example, if we were looking at a list of all tickets that automatically displays new tickets when they are added, we could use “On Element Appear” to detect new elements on the screen and react to it.

If you’re interested in the platform, I’d also encourage you to continue Academy past the Foundation level - there are lots of good videos and challenging automations to build ahead of you!

Best,

Evan

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Hi Evan,

Thanks for the update. I’m still not getting how is UI path going to run constantly in the background to monitor a value change whether I call the “Get Visible Text” activity or the “Appear/Vanish” activities.

Is there some sort of scheduler or hotkey detection agent running on the client side in order to trigger these workflows?

Thanks.

Thierry

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Hi @tfierens1

You could try to play around with the Monitor Events activity. It is supposed to monitor and detect user actions, such as click of the mouse button or a hotkey action and take an action based on that input.

You could program it to process the field upon pressing a specific hotkey :slight_smile:

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@loginerror,

Maybe I’m not expressing correctly what I mean.

Assume I have created 5 workflows. What do I need to do to run this workflows? So far and based on the first training course, I’ve only ever triggered a workflow via the workflow designer but clearly this isn’t a solution, so I’m assuming that there must be an app/service that triggers workflows at regular intervals, on keyboard change, etc…

I hope I’m making more sense.

Thanks.

Thierry

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Hi Thierry,

Some of what you’re talking about comes as part of the “Orchestrator” part of the UiPath platform. With Orchestrator, we can perform a variety of tasks to handle a robotic workforce, such as scheduling bots to run “at regular intervals”.

(Once you’re connected to Orchestrator you can also trigger workflows from the Windows system tray.)

In terms of having the bot do something on keyboard change, what LoginError suggested is quite accurate. Instead of triggering the bot with a keypress, you’d actually have the bot running and it would know to start performing a certain action based on the keypress. Meaning that the bot would be running but mostly inactive, just monitoring events, until it saw the keypress you’d want to trigger it with, at which point it would start performing its workflow.

Best,

Evan

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Hi @Evan_Bruns,

Apologies in the delay getting back but I somehow only got notified today. Thanks for clarifying.

Going back to what @loginerror suggested, it does seem like what I want but when you say “you’d actually have the bot running”, do you mean via the Orchestrator or some local client app?

Is the Orchestrator available in the community edition?

Thanks.

Thierry

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Hi Tfierens,

The bot could be running either by being started locally or by being started via Orchestrator.

There is a community edition Orchestrator, more information on that is here:

Best,

Evan

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hey @loginerror

hope you are doing good !

i am facing a similar scenario.
there is a table in web page, in that if two elements(i mean redlight and comment icon present in a single row based on the present date then) i have to copy a name in the first column and that comment also present in icon.
i have tried so many ways but failed always.
could you please help me to get this issue resolved.
cmntIcon

i m beginner in uipath.

thanks