A visual editor that allows you to build tasks, just by dragging and dropping predefined actions. Everything is visual, this way you can implement complex tasks and logic without even having to write a single line of script. Moreover, the complete resulted task listing is presented in plain English, making it easy to read, understand and modify (read more).
More than 130 versatile and powerful predefined actions that act as building blocks for your tasks. There's an action for every one of your needs, from the simplest one, automating mouse clicks, keystrokes or file operations, to the most complex ones that perform operations between variables, automate Excel, download files from FTP sites, take screen shots, send email, database communication, etc.
The integrated macro recorder lets you record mouse and keyboard events as you perform them and converts them into actions that you can later replay at any speed. Being more than just a dumb recorder, it takes into account all windows in which events are targeted, and generates reliable tasks that are not affected by the machine's possible delays. Of course the recorded actions can be edited and modified through the Visual Job Designer (read more).
WinAutomation includes full support for variables that are used to pass data from an action to another. Apart from simple variables that hold text, numerical, date & time or boolean (true/false) values, WinAutomation can also handle lists (arrays) and DataTables (two-dimensional arrays) for implementing more complex logic and tasks.
Full support of flow control structures is included, ranging from the simple GoTo action to IF/ELSE constructs, and loops of course that can iterate a list, repeat a block of actions for a number of times or for as long as a condition is met. All constructs can be nested at any level, therefore giving the flexibility of a programming language without the accompanying complexity.
Sometimes an automated job may not perform as intended and in this case you need a tool to help you identify the error. For that reason a full featured debugger is included. The debugger allows you to enable and disable actions, watch each action as it executes, set breakpoints to pause execution, execute the job action by action and all that while inspecting the variables' values and system changes.
Imagine that you have built a job that copies a file and it suddenly fails because the destination disk becomes full. Or a job that uploads a file to an FTP server and one day the network is down. All these "exceptional" conditions are called exceptions. With WinAutomation you have the choice to catch those exceptions and implement additional logic into your jobs to handle them. So, instead of having jobs that simply fail when something goes wrong, you can now build truly reliable jobs that you can depend on.
When you implement GUI automation (i.e., when you send mouse clicks and keystrokes to automate an application) often relying your actions on mouse pointer coordinates is not enough. Sometimes you have to wait for a specific visual clue to display or change, or you have to click on a certain point of the screen or window that can only be described by its appearance.
To handle these scenarios, WinAutomation implements the Image Recognition technology that "sees" what's on the screen and can either wait for a specific image to appear (be it a button, a control, or any part of a non-standard interface), or move the mouse and click on a specific image. This unique approach can handle tasks that are extremely difficult to automate and virtually removes any barriers controlling what you can or not automate with WinAutomation.
A powerful task scheduler that allows you to schedule any job on a daily, weekly, monthly or arbitrary schedule is included in WinAutomation (read more).
WinAutomation includes a complete collection of triggers that you may set to constantly monitor you system and execute jobs at specific events. You may, for example, have a trigger to monitor a folder and execute jobs whenever a file is created or modified within it, or you may monitor any Windows Service, the Windows Event Log, the running processes, the keyboard and many other aspects of your system.
Every event related to WinAutomation is registered into its own event log. Examining the log you are able to see which jobs were triggered and what was the result of the job's execution at any time.
WinAutomation being a feature-rich automation platform, includes a vast collection of actions that are available to you whenever you install the application. However, some actions are by far too specialized to be included in WinAutomation’s core functions (e.g. a group of actions that automate Twitter, would not be in everyone's interest). This is why WinAutomation allows the use of Add-ons.
Essentially Add-ons in WinAutomation are external packs of actions that can be downloaded from our website and are installed separately in the main application according to your needs. The main purpose the Add-ons serve, is to provide WinAutomation’s users with as many features as possible while keeping the number of core actions easily manageable. This practically means that we do not have to sacrifice flexibility for features or vice versa.
The Professional Edition includes a Job Compiler that allows you to compile any job into a standalone .Net executable file. You may compile the jobs and run then on an unlimited number of computers within your organization without having WinAutomation installed (read more).
