Object Studio

Object Studio facilitates the creation of business objects by providing a familiar flow chart interface, as used in Process Studio. Such business objects are known as Visual Business Objects.

Typically, a visual business object is used for interacting with a legacy windows applications with no API. Applications which do provide an API may well be more suitably automated using a COM business object. An exception to this advice is Mainframe applications: their use is so widespread that Blue Prism offers special features to allow speedy integration with these APIs.

Stages are laid out on the diagram as in Process Studio, with flow being controlled using decision and choice stages.

Pages

In a business process, flow begins at the start stage of the main page and continues by following the links from one stage to the next. Each page is a logical sub-division of the natural flow. Pages exist primarily as a) a means of re-using often-repeated groups of stages; and b) a means of tidying up the process diagram. For this reason any process could in fact be represented equivalently on a single page.

By contrast, pages in a business object which are public do not represent subdivisions of a whole; each page is an entity in its own right, known as a capability having its own start point. In this sense, a business object has no unique start point: only lots of capabilities, each with its own unique start point.

When processes make use of business objects, they call the relevant capability (ie the chosen page) directly; execution does not proceed via a main page.

Publishing Pages

As described above, each page represents a unique entry point into the business object. By default, none of these entry points are visible from your Blue Prism processes. They only become visible when you publish a page. This is achieved via a context menu option on the page header. Once published, you capabilities can be called from an action stage, as normal.

By keeping pages unpublished, you may have "private" pages that are useful within your business object, but which you do not want to expose. Equally, this is a useful tactic for making sure that a new capability is not made available until it is ready and has been fully tested.

New Stage Types

Object Studio introduces the following new stage types: Read, Write, Navigate, Code and Wait. These stage types are only available in Object Studio; they are not available in Process Studio. The new stages are designed for controlling the interaction with your target application: read and write stages control the retrieval and input of data; navigate opens menus, clicks buttons etc; wait is used to make sure your target application is ready for your next stage (eg it has finished loading); and code stages allow advanced users to make use of COM objects.

Application Modeller

The Application Modeller is a key feature of object studio. The first task in building a business object of any application is to teach Blue Prism about the Elements of your target application. This involves creating a friendly name such as "OK Button" and then showing Blue Prism where to find this element via a point and click operation with the mouse. The process is repeated until you have defined all elements of interest in your target application. This will include any text boxes, list views, combo boxes etc from which you wish to read data, and it will include any menus, buttons and tab controls that you need to use.

After you have defined the elements of your target application, they are then ready to be used in the new stages described above. The application element treeview featured in the Application Modeller appears in the properties forms of the new stages. The elements are used simply by dragging them from the tree and dropping them into a new row in the properties form. For example, to read some text from a text box in your application, you drag the text box element into a new row in a read stage, and drag a data item into the same row. When this stage is executed, the text will be read from your target application and stored in the chosen data item.