Learn how UiPath can help interact with any type of application, including Desktop, Web, SAP, Citrix, Remote Desktop, Java, etc., in three different ways.

What is an application?

An application has two components. The first is the user interface. A user has the ability to interact with things like text boxes, buttons, labels, and other UI elements visible to them. And applications also have a backend. This is where various construction logic or business logic resides or rules on where a button navigates to or how data is actually stored in the application. Now, when developers are building both of these components, they use something called selectors. For web applications, that’s things like HTML code. For desktop applications, that’s something called Win32 tags. But UiPath’s bread and butter is the ability to interact with the user interface and reliably interact with all of those UI elements.

Let’s list the three ways that UiPath will actually interact with any type of application.

1

The first method is called Multi-Anchor Unified Targeting. This is a default way of interacting with an application.
Let’s mention the four different aspects of UI elements:
— the selector;
— a fuzzy version of it, which eliminates dynamic things like IDs;
— the text;
— an image as a fallback.

2

If UiPath isn’t installed on the same device as an application, you might need to use things like Citrix Automation or Native RDP Automation. The way this works is the robot would sit on the actual client machine. But there’s a virtual channel client that would interact with a remote runtime that’s installed on the remote application server.

3

If neither Multi-Anchor Unified Targeting nor Citrix or Native RDP Automation is available, then AI Computer Vision can be used. AI Computer Vision leverages machine learning models to basically allow the robot to interact with the screen exactly like how a human does.

Watch the video below to learn each method in more detail.