Question

What is Surface Automation technique in Blueprism?

Answer 1

@Pratibha, Blue Prism provides Surface Automation techniques that can be used as an alternative when technology connectors are not available. Surface automation is the process of creating automation according to images shown on a screen. It is notoriously fragile and should be considered as a secondary method after programmatic solutions. Surface automation is useful at least in two cases: when you can’t use controls programmatically (i.e. by element identifiers), or when the system under automation is changing (i.e. element identifiers are changing). It can also be faster than ’normal’ scripting.

In case of flash objects used in website, surface automation might be needed if there is no programmatic way to control or extract data from the object. Surface automation techniques, such as optical character recognition (OCR) and object detection, are based on broader class of computer vision.

Comments

BP does not recommend Surface Automation however, if there is no alternative then we can go surface automation. BP 6.6 version has introduced new features and improve existing mechanism in order to achieve better outcomes.