Prepare to Use a MuleSoft RPA Recorder
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the types of user steps that are documented in an RPA process design.
- Explain how to prepare to run MuleSoft RPA Recorder on your Windows machine.
An RPA process design is composed of two different levels of information. The higher-level design shows how activities are connected. The lower-level design shows the details of how a particular activity is implemented. In the next two units, you learn how the MuleSoft RPA Recorder can automate collecting details about user actions to carry out a particular activity in a Windows system.
Capture User Steps to Automate in an RPA Process Implementation
In a previous unit, you learned that an RPA process includes the Start and End Events, automated Bot Task activities, manual User Task activities, and Gateway activities. The BPMN symbols show how the flow is broken down into steps between various Bot Tasks and User Tasks, but they don’t specify how any of these tasks, particularly a Bot Task, should be implemented.
To help the RPA developer, it’s helpful to provide specific details about how a user would manually carry out the tasks that are now being automated. This includes screenshots of the GUI that will be navigated and examples or actual literal values for keystrokes. Additionally, you may want to provide a record of what type of mouse actions occur as the process is carried out.
In fact, most RPA processes are really sequential mouse movements and mouse clicks, visually looking for patterns on the screen, and typing in values on the keyboard. RPA process designs have a special syntax for specifying all these user actions so they can be automatically converted into an initial implementation when the BPMN diagram is imported into MuleSoft RPA Builder.
MuleSoft RPA Recorder is a tool that runs on a Windows system that can follow a user's actions and record the RPA process movements as comments in the BPMN design document.
This is a powerful feature that makes implementing many common RPA process use cases simple and straightforward.
Prepare to Run a MuleSoft RPA Recorder on Your Windows System
Remember, you are recording user actions to be automated by an RPA bot. Before using RPA Recorder, ensure that the following items match between your Windows system and the Windows system that runs the RPA bots.
- The screen resolutions.
- ClearType (a font-smoothing algorithm built into MicrosoftⓇ Windows) is turned on or off on both systems.
- The menu has drop-shadow settings.
- Turn off any settings that may disrupt workflow, such as displaying unplanned windows. For example, when Windows updates or other application update notifications appear on the screen.
In the following graphic, observe how the font appears on a ClearType-enabled Windows system versus one where ClearType is disabled.
With ClearType, there tends to be ghost pixels with intermediate color and gray-scale values. This rendering confuses the image searching algorithms and can make searches less accurate.
You can check the Windows system settings on each Windows system and ensure they match.
The following are the recommended Windows system settings.
- Disable screen saver.
- Turn off all power option properties.
- Disable automatic Windows updates.
- Disable ClearType.
- Disable menu drop-shadow effects.
- Set desktop scaling to 100%.
- Make sure Windows fonts match.
Windows has a general performance setting for visual effects that turns off all settings related to picture search at the same time. We strongly recommend adjusting this setting for all client systems and all systems used to create workflows. From the Windows Start menu, open Settings. Search for Performance then click Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows.
In the Performance Options dialog box, select the Visual Effects tab and set the radio button to Adjust for best performance—this should unselect all the options—and click Apply.
Walkthrough
Take a look at these walkthrough instructions that show you how to prepare your Windows computer to run the MuleSoft RPA Recorder.