Windows Desktop Automation

Start Windows Desktop Automation

• Start Sahi Dashboard
• Click Processes link on Sahi Pro Dashbord. Ensure that Windows Automation is turned on. "Sahi windows agent started!" message appears on Sahi Pro console.

Using the Controller

• First we need to create a Flowchart. If you are not familiar with creating a flowcharts, see Create a Flowchart
• To launch Flowcharts Controller, visit the Flowcharts window. Click on the dropdown arrow next to Launch and then select Open Controller.

• Click on any node of the flowchart and select Automate.
• From the Automate dialog, click on the window icon
The Controller can be used to interact with the desktop application. You can Identify, Click, Set, Assert, choose Other Actions on the Windows Desktop application.

Element Identification

• Launch the Flowcharts Controller and click on any node of the flowchart and select Automate.
• In the Automate dialog, click on the Windows button. This enables the identification for Windows automation.

• To identify an element, press the CTRL key, hover over any element and release the CTRL key.
  infoThe accessors will not be populated till CTRL key is released. This is an optimization to stop Sahi from unwanted processing
  .

Restricted Identification/Recording

• To automate a Windows application, you would start recording actions on the application. However, Windows automation allows you to automate on the entire system screen. Thus, actions performed on other applications, Taskbar, Windows Start Menu, etc. also get recorded. To ignore such actions, restrict recording and identification to a specific application process, follow below steps:
1. In the Automate dialog, expand the dropdown for the Windows button. It lists the processes that are running in the system. Hovering over a process name will display all the window titles it encompases. Select the process name to restrict the Windows automation.

2. Note that the provision to add this restriction is also available in the Flowcharts Controller.

Automating a Keyword

A. You can use Click, Set, Assert, choose 'Other Actions' to perform an action on the Windows Desktop Application.

B. You will need to record these steps explicitly by clicking on 'Add Step'.

Playback

1. On the Automate dialog click on Runbutton.
2. The Run Settings dialog opens. Select the Mode Windows if we did not mentioned in the scipt and click RUN.

View Report

1. Click on the Reports button..
2. The Report opens in a new browser tab.

Scripting Notes

• To start a Windows application from flow, use Execute inbuilt action.

• All code interactions with Windows will need to be preceded by Set Mode inbuilt action and Application Type as WINDOWS.

Additional Configurations

• Execute Faster by Ignoring Hidden and Disabled Elements
• While searching for an element during Playback, Sahi internally iterates through all the elements on the application screen. At times, this iteration may be slower for few screens in your application. This iteration can be made faster by adding below properties to the userdata.properties file as applicable.

// Add below property to ignore hidden elements in your application
sahi.desktop_automation.windows_automation.ignore_hidden_elements=true

// Add below property to ignore disabled elements in your application
sahi.desktop_automation.windows_automation.ignore_disabled_elements=true

• Enable Identifying Inner Elements
• In some applications, inner elements may not be identified from the Sahi Controller. Lets say a pane element contains child elements like textbox, button, etc and the child elements are not getting identified from Sahi Controller. To fix this, find the entry for the parent element type in <Sahi_Installation>\config\accessor_metadata\mswindows.json file. Add a new key "deepSearchAlgo" with value as "child" in this entry for the parent element type.
For example, the key "deepSearchAlgo" can be added for a pane element as shown below.

{"type": "pane", "name":"_pane", "id":"50033", "deepSearchAlgo":"child",  "attributes": ["name", "automationId", "helpText", "className", "index"], "action": "setValue", "value" : "transform", "assertType":"TEXT", "since": ["NA", "NA", "NA", "7.0.0"]}