Looking for suggestions on challenging custom activity ideas to develop in C#

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Hi there! I’m looking for some challenging activities to work on. Can anyone suggest some ideas? Here are some of the activities I have completed so far:

  • Change file extensions (excluding Excel files)
  • Convert Excel formats to .xlsx
  • Performed bulk insert into a SQL server without manually creating a table schema
  • Convert HTML to PDF

I would appreciate any suggestions for custom activities that are either challenging or can help reduce development time for RPA developers or execution time for the process. Feel free to suggest scope activity ideas as well. Thank you!

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Something I came across a couple of times is when converting JSON to DT or DT to JSON you often need to reformat values. Especially to make “PUT” Calls to the API, when converting DT to JSON you often need to add additonal " quotes… Sometimes this can be a pain, because you can not quote in quotes, so I use something like Chr(34) with a Regex Replace.

To make it useful you would probably need to play around with an API yourself to get the hang of it and what is needed to put / post API calls, this also varies from API to API of course, so it would need to be flexible.

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actully i didnt used api , if possible can you explain in a little more detail

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Yeah so let’s say I use the UiPath Web Activities to make an HTTP Call to a REST API.

Now I do something in my process and in the end I want to submit the data to the REST API via PUT method.
Also depends on the API, but let’s say we use the “Body” as JSON String to make that PUT Call. So now I need a perfectly formatted JSON String for that API.

A normal PUT call to write back let’s say a customer number including turnover sales would look like this:

"{"API_R_TURNOVER": [{{"CNR": "123456789", "DATEFROM": "20220101", "DATETO": "20221231", "TURNOVER": 9999.00}]}"

What I need to submit via Body in UiPath Activity:

"{""API_R_TURNOVER"": [{{""CNR"": ""123456789"", ""DATEFROM"": ""20220101"", ""DATETO"": ""20221231"", ""TURNOVER"": 9999.00}]}"

For every string in that API Call I need double Quotes, but if it’s an Integer I do not need any Quotes.
So far I just build the string together like it needs to be and then to a Regex Replace like so:
System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(str_JSON.ToString,(Chr(34)),str_char_Quotes)

Where var str_char_Quotes = Chr(34) + Chr(34) – to get the Double Quotes…

It’s probably a very specific problem, but to deserialize JSON we do have activities, but to serialize it we do not (correct me if I’m wrong here)