WinAutomation Features
WinAutomation is an automation tool that contains plenty of features to help you automate every task in the most easy and reliable way. The major features of the application are:
Visual Job Designer
A completely visual editor that lets you build tasks by dragging and dropping predefined actions. Everything is visual and you can implement complex tasks and logic without writing a single command. Moreover, the complete resulted task listing is presented in plain english, making it easy to read, understand and modify (read more).
Plenty of Predefined Actions
More than 130 versatile and powerful predefined actions that act as building blocks for your tasks. You will find an action for every need, from simple ones that automate mouse clicks, keystrokes or file operations, all the way to more complex ones that perform operations between variables, automate Excel, download files from FTP sites, take screen shots, send email, communicate with databases, etc.
Macro Recorder
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 the windows in which the events are targeted to generate reliable tasks that are not affected by the delays of a slower computer. Of course the recorded actions can be edited and modified through the Visual Job Designer (read more).
Variables
WinAutomation includes full support for variables that are used to pass data from an action to another. Apart from simple variables that can 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.
Flow Control, Conditionals, Loops
Full support for flow control structures is included, ranging from the simple GoTo action to IF/ELSE constructs and of course loops that can iterate a list, repeat a block of actions a number of times or until a condition changes. All constructs can be nested at any lever, therefore giving the flexibility of a programming language without the accompanying complexity.
Integrated Debugger
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 lets you enable and disable actions, watch each action as it executes, set breakpoints to pause execution, execute the job action by action and at the same time inspect the variables' values and system changes.
Exception Handling
Imagine that you have built a job to copy 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.
Image Recognition
When you implement GUI automation (i.e., when you send mouse clicks and keystrokes to automate an application) often basing your actions on mouse pointer coordinates is not enough. Sometimes you have to wait for a particular 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 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 limit on what you can automate using WinAutomation.
Task Scheduler
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).
Triggers
WinAutomation includes a complete set 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, or you may monitor any Windows Service, the Windows Event Log, the running processes, the keyboard and many other aspects of your system.
Event Log
Every event related to WinAutomation is registered into its own event log. By examining the log you will be able to see which jobs were triggered and what was the result of the execution at any time.
Compile to Exe
The Professional Edition includes a Job Compiler that lets you compile any job into a standalone .Net executable. You may compile the jobs and run then in an unlimited number of computers within your organization without having WinAutomation installed (read more)
