Working with bots

Depending on the license and permission assigned to you, you can perform various bot operations and access the private and public workspaces in the Control Room.

Licenses

Two types of licenses are available: Bot Creator and Bot Runner (attended or unattended) licenses.

Automation 360 licenses

Bot Creator tasks

A Bot Creator user can access both the private workspace and public workspace in the Control Room by navigating to Automation on the left panel. The license provides the user exclusive access to the registered device. Other users cannot use the default device of a Bot Creator.

With the Bot Creator license and specific permissions, you can perform the following tasks:

You can also edit, analyze, save, clone, view content, pause, or stop a Task Bot.

Bot Runner tasks

There are two types of Bot Runners, attended Bot Runner and unattended Bot Runner. Bot Runners can access only the public workspace in the Control Room. They cannot create or edit bots but can view content of a bot.

Attended Bot Runner tasks: With the attended Bot Runner license, you can perform the following tasks:
Note: Users with attended Bot Runner license can run a bot on their own device. With specific permissions, they can also schedule a bot.

See Feature permissions for a role | Bot permissions for a role.

Unattended Bot Runner tasks: With the unattended Bot Runner license, you can perform the following tasks:

Public and private workspaces

The Automation page lists all the folders and bots available within the selected folder in the Public and Private repositories. If you have migrated the Enterprise 11 or Enterprise 10 data to Automation 360, the Automation page additionally displays the Enterprise 11 or Enterprise 10 Task Bots (.atmx) and MetaBots (.mbot) files in the public repository.

When an Enterprise 11 or Enterprise 10 bot is migrated and converted to the Automation 360 bot, the My Tasks and the My Metabots folders display the migrated (Enterprise 11 or Enterprise 10) and the converted bots with the same name but different extension. This might create confusion to differentiate between the two bots. Also, you cannot take any actions on the migrated bots except deleting them. To avoid this confusion, you can use the Show menu option to show or hide the Enterprise 11 or Enterprise 10 bots.

The Show menu displays three options - Folder, .ATMX Task Bot, and .MBOT Meta Bot. By default, each of these options are selected and displays all the folders and sub folders along with the Enterprise 11 or Enterprise 10 bot files.

If you clear the selected Folder option, then the sub-folders will be hidden from the files and folders list and will only display .atmx or .mbot files and when you clear the selected. .ATMX Task Bot or the .MBOT Meta Bot options, the .atmx or .mbot files, will then be hidden across all the folders.

Depending on the license, users logging in to the Control Room can access the private and public workspaces.

Private workspace
Users with the Bot Creator license can access the private workspace. This workspace is primarily used to create and test bots. It enables users to view and manage all their activities in one primary location. Bots in the private workspace is available only to the users who created them.
Note:
  • Users with administrative privileges and Bot Runner license cannot access the private workspace because they cannot create bots.
  • The bot name must be unique. If a bot or a folder with the same name exists in the same folder location which you have access to in the public workspace, you cannot either create, check out, or rename the bot with this name in the private workspace.
Public workspace
Both Bot Creator and Bot Runner users can access the public workspace. This is a shared workspace where you can execute the bots.

Users with the Bot Runner license can run bots created by the Bot Creator user. Bots created in the private workspace by Bot Creators can be made available to specific Bot Runner users in the public workspace by defining the permissions at the folder or file level. To do this, users have to first check in the bot from the private workspace to the public workspace.

Note:
  • When you create a Task Bot with dependencies, ensure that both the parent and child bot are in the same workspace (public or private). You cannot call a public bot from a private bot. To call a bot from the public workspace, you should first check-out or clone the public bot into the private workspace, include it as a child bot inside the private bot, and check-in both the bots.
  • Folder names in private and public workspaces are case-sensitive. You can create a folder with the same name and matching case in private and public workspaces. However, you cannot create folders with the same name but with different case in the workspaces. For example, you can create a folder My Metabots in both private and public workspace. However, you cannot create folder names that use the same name but with different case, such as My Metabots in the private workspace and My MetaBots in the public workspace.
  • Sorting and filtering are supported for substrings. For example, if you want to search for bots or files that have fin in the file or bot name, enter fin as the search criterion. All the bots and files that contain fin in the names will be displayed, for example, Finance, Finder, DeltaFinance, and Dolfin.

    Wildcards are not supported for searching and filtering bots or files.