Why Send Hot Key or Image Automation are not recommended?

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Hi All

We have received feedback from our RPA support team that we should not use hot key or image automation like click image.

Can anyone tell is it really not a good practice to use hot key or click image ? Why is it so and in what cases we should go for them ?

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Image recognition is the last approach to automating applications if nothing else works to identify UI elements on the screen (like selectors or keyboard shortcuts). Because image matching requires elements to be fully visible on the screen and that all visible details are the same at runtime as during development when resorting to image automation extra care should be taken to ensure the reliability of the process. Selecting more/less of an image than needed might lead to an image not found or a false-positive match.

Here are a few examples of common challenges:

  1. Different web-browsers and operating systems render texts and images differently , resulting in different UI element images in each execution environment.
  2. The application’s UI layout usually adapts to the size of the application’s window , causing the size or location of UI elements such as buttons, text boxes and images to change. This is especially problematic for full-screen applications because their size is dynamically determined by the screen resolution of the hosting device.
  3. Identical UI controls may appear multiple times in a single application screen (e.g., multiple text boxes in a form). Further tuning is required to identify a specific image occurrence.

Do read the best practices UiPath documentation for better understanding.

Cheers!!
Prajwal