From the course: Complete Guide to UiPath RPA Development

User Interface quick start - UiPath Tutorial

From the course: Complete Guide to UiPath RPA Development

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User Interface quick start

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- [Instructor] All right, so now that we're all set up and validated, and you know how and where to get new activities for your automations, I want to take a few minutes to give you a quick tour of the UiPath Studio interface and show you some tips about how I set up my interface for more efficient work. As I mentioned earlier, we have these two panels on the left and right sides, respectively. These are very important, but what's most important is this canvas in the center. I like to have as much space as I can for this canvas, so what I usually do is to remove the pins from each of these three tabs to cause them to lay flat on the left side like this. Once they're laying flat, you can simply click on one to interact with it. And it used to be that when I would click on the canvas, that would go away, but now I need to click on it again to put it away. I find that it's easier to read the words in this orientation than when they're down here at the bottom. And now I'll draw your attention to the panel on the right side here. The most popular tab is this Properties tab, and the way that works is when you click on any activity in your workflow, you'll see some configurable properties for that activity over here. These two columns are resizable and that you can move this one around and see more of the data. And of course, you can expand this as well to see it better. Like I said, I like to have a lot of space here, so I tend to keep this a bit more narrow. And in doing so, the names of these tabs aren't very visible. So again, I'll click on all of these tabs, except for Properties, and unpin them so that they lay flat on the right side. And that leaves just my Properties tab open, and I can read the text better on all of these and simply click on it to open, and expand as necessary, then click on it to close again. So that's totally subjective. If you use Object Repository all the time, you could go ahead and pin that one. And now, we have both Properties and Object Repository down here, and the rest are laying flat on the side. You can drag and drop the order of these as well, so that's pretty cool. Now, the final thing I do is to double-click on this top menu to shrink up that ribbon, and that maximizes my automation canvas space. When I want to see those menus again, I simply click on Design, use whatever I want, and then when I click away, that menu disappears. You can always pin it again by double-clicking on design, and now it'll stick. Lots of these icons up here in this ribbon are very important. We talked about Manage Packages earlier. This Test Manager button is relevant to test automation, and this will allow you to open up that test manager website, but you need to first make a configuration over in the settings before you can do that. We've got a recorder, some computer vision. This is how we extract tables from websites. We've got an analyzer here that allows you to check your project against static rules as a quality control before checking it in or publishing it. And we've got our Publish button that allows us to send the automation into the orchestrator server. We've already talked a bit about the Project tab, but I would like to point out that there is a settings icon here that when you click on it, it has a whole bunch of interesting settings. One important setting is this modern design experience setting, and I'll talk about that in a video coming up. These Workflow Analyzer settings are related to this Analyze File button up here, and all of these settings icons allow you to configure your preferences, and these are essentially global settings for various activities so that when you drag them onto the canvas, they behave in a specific and consistent way out of the box. If you leave these various settings blank on the activity in the workflow, this is sort of a parent-level setting that will control the default behavior of lots of activities in your workflow. If you right-click on your project, you see we've got some options like opening the project folder, which is the folder on the disk where this project lives. You can also add folders or files, sequences, flow charts, state machines, and so on. And finally, you can Add To Source Control from here if you want to. You can also right-click in the white space out here to do all of those same things. I'll call your attention to these three tabs at the very bottom. We'll see these in action in upcoming videos. If I click on Output, that brings up a little panel at the bottom that will show the output of log message activities, and you can turn the timestamp on and off by using that icon right there. These are just filters for the different kinds of log messages. I can pin that to keep it here or I can click on it to put it away. The Error List will show up when there are problems with your project, and Breakpoints is relevant to the Debugging tab where we will eventually be able to set break points and stop the robot execution at desired points. Again, I'll talk about that in the Debugging section. There's a dropdown down here at the very bottom, and this shows the orchestrator folders to which you have access. And when you select any given folder, it talks to Orchestrator and brings down various server attributes you might need to work with. So for example, if I click on Data Manager, we see assets queues, entities, and so on. These are all things that exist in Orchestrator in a particular folder. We've got an Add To Source Control dropdown here, and we can use these two commands to initialize a Git repository and copy this project into a specified Git repository. And again, this is more enterprise-level stuff that I talked about in my UiPath Level 2 course. Finally, for test automation, we've got this Test Explorer over here, and this is something you use for looking at the results of your test suites. How many past test cases, failed test cases, and not executed? And I talk more about that in my UiPath Test Automation course. Finally, this Home menu here is very significant. You can see I'm inside my project, and when I click on Home, it takes me to a totally different view where I can create new processes, check out things from source control, or interact with various tools and settings, and help, which includes the current version I'm using, and also has a feature to generate a governance file, which, again, is related to that Workflow Analyzer feature I talked about before. The Team tab here is another access point to your source control features, and again, I cover this stuff in my UiPath Level 2 course. Templates are a bunch of starting points that you could use instead of starting with a blank project. One of the most popular starting points is this Robotic Enterprise Framework, otherwise known as RE Framework, and I'll talk a little bit about that in the next section, but I do a full exploration of that in my UiPath Level 2 course. To go back to your project, you click on this arrow, and now you're ready to start dragging activities in and building up your automation. Finally, there are some controls at the bottom left and bottom right of this automation canvas. When I click on this tab, I can see variables that I'm using in my automation. This tab is for arguments which are similar to variables, but it's information we're passing in to our automation from the outside or passing between workflows. I'll talk about that in future lectures. Finally, the zoom control here, of course, allows you to zoom in, and you can use this hand to move your project around. But instead of using these, I prefer to hold down my Control key and use my mouse wheel to scroll in and out. And then we've got this icon called Fit to screen, which would fit your entire structure on the screen. I'll take this back to 100% for now. We've got an Outline icon that allows you to use this box to slide up and down through your project. I'll click to toggle that off. And finally, I've got this Outline tab over here, which will show a tree view of all of the activities that I have in my screen and allow me to jump around and navigate faster than I might be able to by expanding and contracting activities. So that's a quick overview of the 2023 UiPath Studio Interface. I'll go ahead and double-click on this to put it away, and in the next lecture, I'll talk about a couple of basic settings that I make before we jump onto the next section and start learning RPA skills. Hopefully, you're finding this helpful.

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