Fun with SAP Community and SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (IRPA)

1. So recently I started learning about IRPA, and as I just started this journey and don’t have any real use case, I thought to do some automation on the SAP Community website for some fun learning 😉 . So In this blog post, I will show some of the weird automations that I did with SAP IRPA and Community.

Note: this post is just me having fun with irpa and community website and not a real use case.

Automation to the Community Website:

1. Perform auto logon(Currently my hardcoded userid and password in the bot) and open “Activities” page.
2. If any notifications are available, show a popup to open those notifications.
3. If opted to open notification by clicking “Yes” button, open top 5 unread notifications in different tabs of the browser.
4. Also, Providing an explicit bot option to open “Top 5 Unread” notification.

So using this bot, we can open Top 5 unread notifications(in case of new notifications), again, just for fun 😉 😀

First, a Demo:

Let’s see how I achieved this.

All workflows image below:

1. Perform auto logon and open “Activities” page.

So I used the below URL, which will open the logon page and after the credentials are entered, it will automatically navigate to the activities page, which is automatically handled by the SAP itself as I’ve mentioned the activites page URL as parameter in the below login URL.

https://accounts.sap.com/saml2/idp/sso?sp=sp.accounts.sap.com&RelayState=https://activities.sap.com

So the only thing the IRPA does here is to open the above URL and enter the userid and password in the input fields and click on Submit button

IRPA Config.(DoLogon)

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So at the end of the workflow, I am calling CheckForNotfications scenario (which is part of a different application).

Note: I am using different application instead of different pages because when I run the IRPA bot, it is not able to recognise different URL’s. as my logon url is different and my activities page url is different. But if I create those two as two different applciations then it is working fine, not sure why though.. can anyone provide any suggestion on this?

If any notifications are available, show a popup to open those notifications.

When the CheckForNotfications workflow is called, it will check for the above notification icon on profile icon and if notification is available, it will open the above popup.

I am using a general popup, that i created in the popups section. and I will wait for the “Open” button click event (wait click) inside the config and when clicked, I will close the popup.

Now upon click of the Open button, it will call the “OpenInbox” scenario ( created another workflow so that I can provide the option to open the inbox and top5 notifications automatically via manual scenario and it will be used in our current popup scenario).

If opted to open notification by clicking “Yes” button, open top 5 unread notifications in different tabs of the browser

Now in OpenInbox scenario, bot will click on the profile icon and when the profile popup comes, it will click on the “Inbox” link to open the inbox.

After this, it will call “InboxNotifications” scenario, which will open the top 5 unread notifications.

Give an explicit bot option to open “Top 5 Unread” notification

I used loop to loop through all notifications, where i used Occurs, Ancestor and stuff to recognise the links and click on them using workflow.

I had to use some manually code because of many complexities. for instance, only open top 5 unread notifications or only comment and not the community member link incase of comments..,

So that’s it folks, I somehow managed to execute this, but still so many things are still there to figure out, especially if I am doing it correctly or not(As I am new to IRPA and still learning) So please drop in suggestions if I am doing something incorrectly here 🙂

Also one thing to point out is that, even though the coding in IRPA is based on javascript, I can’t really use console like browsers here in debugging, which is a huge issue, for me at least. So it is very difficult to analyse the data in debugging, So let me know if anyone knows something about this.

and thanks Vijay Sharma , I bugged you a lot with my doubts but you took time to help me out learning some of the concepts in IRPA 🙂

Regards,

Mahesh