I would like to suggest that we should a feature which enables us for offline development. Like UIExplorer Captures all the elements of the screen. We should have a something like UIStorage Also where we can capture all the objects of the screen and later we can use it for the offline development, i.e. during development we donot need to have the live applicaiton open with us.
This will help when we do not have the live access of the screen or availabitity of applicaiton is very less. This feature will help RPA Developers and Increase their productivity.
Nice to have but it would take years to implement for all the UI Frameworks. Capturing the objects sounds good.
When you don’t have direct access to the machine with the apps, do you have remote access to it?
It wouldn’t solve your problem now, but a new feature we’re thinking about might solve it.
I think UIExplorer already have the capturing capability of all UI Frameworks we just need to work upon storage functionality. We can define a data structure to do so.
@Cosmin , What i meant with offline development, E.g. I need to automate a Application that is accessible inside the organisation network only. But Developer doesn’t have the access to the network , or a get access to it for a very limited period of time. So he can capture all the screens and objects. Then he do the development later. It will help in;
a) Work from Home.
b) Get screens in requirement gathering phase which will be helpful to gather the correct requirements.
c) Also in the scenario where test access is not available so he can capture the live application just work on those screens till he gets access to test environment for testing.
It can create a great feature to differentiate our tool from others.
Again, will be nice to have but the effort to develop such thing (dumps of the target app) is very high. Think that you’re saving not only a window but you must save all the application states. Secondly, even of you’re working for home you won’t be able to test.
RPA is usually very data intensive so when working for home I prepare the data (inputs and outputs) around those apps and fill in the UI Automation pieces when I get live access.
An object browser makes sense. We have it on the roadmap but we discovered that is not such a big impediment. In 95% of the cases you will not reuse a text-box actually.