OpenBots Studio Demo: Support for Tag UI

When someone is first exploring open source RPA many times they will explore a variety of different RPA products one of these projects that have been ongoing for a number of years has been tag UI. Their goal is to make an entirely text based very flexible automation software none particular issue that Tag UI has at moment is that it doesn’t have any Way to really orchestrate itself to deploy itself on different machines and really scale out to the level that an enterprise would want to see.

It shares many of the problems you might have if you were to manage your python automations which is at the end of the day your still going to be using the windows scheduler and batch strip files to manage your automations.

One thing we decided to do on the OpenBots development team was to try and provide a way for Tag UI developers to use our studio. Our agent and our server to package up their Tag UI automations and run them on the OpenBots agent so that our partners and anyone who decides to use OpenBots software can really use it as a centralized hub for their automations both new and old.

You can see when you go to our project manager one of the supported project types is the Tag UI project. So if you do my Tag UI project for example and we create it. We are going to be provided a basic Tag UI sample script. Clicking the run button it will open up the OpenBots website. Click the register button and just wait 5 seconds before closing down and then you can see it closed down.

The way we view this is that as a developer you can take existing Tag UI automations and import them into our studio and package them up to our server using our publishing feature or create them entirely in our studio it operates just like notepad were you to decide to develop your Tag UI script using notepad as some of the development documentation makes reference to or you can use some of their other provided ide options with a notepad plus plus extension for example.

Regardless, once you have a finished automation you can go ahead and click the file button click publish project and put your basic information in at that point it will package everything up into a new project and publish it locally and to the server.

When something is published to the OpenBots server as an automation it has its automation engine flag set to the appropriate engine in this case we’re doing the Tag UI so when we go to run this what the agent is going to do is determine that we are running a Tag UI automation and it is going to execute it using the standard command line that you would go ahead and execute yourself when going about running Tag UI.

It does rely on an existing Tag UI installation. To occur on the machine it checks this by checking for the path variable that you set as step 4 in the instructions. By going to the OpenBots agent then going to attendee mode we are able to select our Tag UI project to run from our local source. Then click the run button and everything is going to execute just as it did a moment ago in the studio. This will happen with attended and unattended automations that you can go ahead and schedule and really deploy in an enterprise grade manner. You can see that our project has executed successfully.

That concludes the Tag UI integration one thing we hope to do down the line is work with the product and see other ways that we can integrate it and really bolster up the automation.