Using UI Automation for browser interactions

UI Automation Cloud capabilities offer powerful and comprehensive features designed to enhance productivity by building browser-based cross-platform automation which enables you to automate repetitive tasks, reduce manual input errors, and improve overall efficiency.

UI Automation Cloud offers an extensive range of capabilities that simulate human behavior (for instance, clicking screen elements, typing text, data scraping, or screen scraping) when interacting with web applications.

To implement end-to-end business scenarios, these capabilities can be integrated with other API-based activity packages, such as Microsoft 365 or Integration Service activity packages, enabling seamless data transfer and real-time synchronization between them.

You can troubleshoot UI-based automations by quickly understanding the cause of the errors when viewing the executions via the Live Streaming and the robot Recording capabilities.

Also, UI Automation Cloud capabilities offer an out-of-the-box solution to automate the nFactor authentication for web business applications, which helps build automation implying multiple authentication Factors that are chained together. For more details, see UI Automation Browser Connection.

Supported browsers for UI Automation

Design time - You can design automations with UI Automation activities in Studio Web from Google Chrome (Windows and macOS) or Microsoft Edge (Windows).
Studio Web and the target web apps must be rendered in the same browser (Chrome or Edge) and the UiPath^® extension must be installed for the browser.
Run time - Automations built with UI Automation and Studio Web run by default on serverless robots in the UiPath Cloud in Chrome. With the help of UiPath Orchestrator, they can be configured to run unattended using Chrome on Windows, macOS, and Automation Cloud robots where the Chrome browser and the UiPath extension for Chrome are installed.

Note:

In response to Google’s timeline for Chrome Manifest V2 (MV2) deprecation, starting from June 2024, existing Studio Web extensions for Chrome and Edge have been updated to be fully compatible with Manifest V3, while retaining the same extension IDs for both browsers (Chrome and Edge).

No action is required to receive the new MV3 extensions, which will be automatically updated when you reopen the browser. Following the upgrade to MV3, the debugging banner notification will be displayed each time you start an interactive selection.

When the automation runs on serverless robots, the MV2 extension is still used. The robot serverless image will also be updated to include the pre-installed MV3 extension for Chrome before the Chrome MV2 deprecation in stable versions.

Use cases

Here are some of the most common use cases for UI Automation with Studio Web.

Automate business scenarios

Customer service automation
Automating responses to common customer inquiries: get inquiries data from Outlook, upload it into business applications, and generate automatic responses.
Accounting automation
Create expense reports, automatically categorizing expenses and transactions to streamline bookkeeping processes.
Order processing
Automate order fulfillment processes with SAP Fiori, including order entry, invoicing, and shipping.
Employee onboarding
Use automated workflows to streamline the hiring process and onboard new employees in Workday.

Web scraping

Customer feedback analysis
Analyze customer reviews and feedback about your products and services on various review sites and social media web platforms. Use the UI Automation web scraping capabilities to gather data in real time and analyze it to improve your products or services.
Price comparison
Compare prices of products from various e-commerce websites. Use web scraping tools to extract pricing data from multiple sources and aggregate it for further comparison.
Lead generation
Generate leads by collecting contact information, such as email addresses and phone numbers, from various websites. Use the UI Automation web scraping capabilities to automate lead generation and save time and effort.
Product review scraping
Scrape product reviews for e-commerce websites from different sources to get insights into product quality, customer satisfaction, and potential issues. Use web scraping tools to gather reviews and analyze them to improve their products or services.

Automated testing

UI Automation can perform automated testing on user interfaces and ensure that they function properly under different scenarios.

Activities

The UI Automation activities are really easy to use, even if you have no previous experience in automation. These activities offer drag-and-drop interfaces, allowing you to perform point-and-click interaction to quickly build automation.

Multiple UI Automation activities available in Studio Web, including: