Windows Locators

This article focuses on the intricacies of Windows Locators.

We are consolidating the detailed documentation here, but in the meantime, the links to existing documentation are available here.

The term Windows Locators for our tooling means locators that target the values in the application UI structure. So in cases where the application exposes its UI structure, we can create much more robust and reliable UI automation in place of image recognition or "click x,y" type automation.

Creation of Windows application locators is supported in Robocorp tooling via the Inspector. You find Windows Application Locators in VS Code.

We are developing our Inspector, so if it does not yet find the locator you are looking for, you can use also use Microsoft Accessibility Insights

On the robot level, the library for Windows automation is RPA.Windows. For cross-platform desktop automations, we also have RPA.Desktop.

A collective article on How to find user interface elements using locators and keyboard shortcuts in Windows applications, will help you in getting started.

For Java based applications there is the RPA.JavaAccessBridge -library We do not yet have Java-based locators support directly in our tooling, but Google's open-source tool for the task is Access Bridge Explorer

To get the full spectrum of options in desktop automation, checkout: Desktop automation and RPA

We also have a bunch of example robots in our portal on desktop automation