Advanced concepts¶

Object repositories¶

Object repositories are optional csv files which can store variables for use in flows. They help to separate your flows from your personal data (like login information for web flows), and allow you to share common information between multiple flows for easy updating.

Each flow has a local object repository and all flows share the global object repository. The local object repository is the tagui_local.csv in the same folder as the flow. The global object repository is the tagui_global.csv in the tagui/src/ folder.

An object repository could look like this:

object	definition
email	user-email-textbox
create account	btn btn–green btn-xl signup-btn

Within the flow, TagUI can use the objects email, create account as variables and they will be replaced directly by the definitions before it is run. Local definitions take precedence over global definitions.

If user-email-textbox was the identifier for some web text input, then you could use the following in your flow:

type `email` as my_email@email.com

Datatables¶

Datatables are csv files which can be used to run your flows multiple times with different inputs.

A datatable (trade_data.csv) could look like this:

#	trade	username	password	pair	size	direction
1	Trade USDSGD	test_account	12345678	USDSGD	10000	BUY
2	Trade USDSGD	test_account	12345678	USDJPY	1000	SELL
3	Trade EURUSD	test_account	12345678	EURUSD	100000	BUY

To use it, you run your flow with tagui my_flow.tag trade_data.csv. TagUI will run my_flow.tag once for each row in the datatable (except the header). Within the flow, TagUI can use the variables trade, username, password, etc as if they were in the local object repository and the values will be from that run’s row.

You can run the flow with the speed option like this: tagui my_flow.tag trade_data.csv speed to remove the delay between runs.

Running other flows within a flow¶

A flow can run another flow, like this:

tagui login_crm.tag

Variables in the parent flow are accessible in the child flow.

Visual automation tricks¶

If you make the background of a UI element in a .png file 100% transparent using an image editor, TagUI will be able to target the element regardless of its background.

Conversely, you can also remove the foreground content near some anchor element like a frame, to allow you to OCR varying content in the empty area using the read step.

Writing Python within flows¶

You can write Python code in TagUI flows. Python needs to be installed separately.

The py step can be used to run commands in Python (TagUI will call python on the command line). You can pass string values back to TagUI with print(). The stdout will be stored in the py_result variable in TagUI.

py a=1
py b=2
py c=a+b
py print(c)
echo py_result

You can also use py begin and py finish before and after a Python code block:

py begin
a=1
b=2
c=a+b
print(c)
py finish
echo py_result

You can pass a variable to Python like this:

phone = 1234567
py 'phone = ' + phone
py print(phone)
echo py_result

Saving flow run results¶

You can save an html log of the run and the flow run results to tagui/src/tagui_report.csv with the report option.

tagui my_flow.tag report

The CSV file will show one line for each run, when it started, how long it took to complete, any error message during run, and the link to the log file for that run.

Create log files for debugging¶

To do advanced debugging, you can create log files when running flows by creating an empty tagui_logging file in tagui/src/.

my_flow.log stores output of the execution.
my_flow.js is the generated JavaScript file that was run.
my_flow.raw is the expanded flow after parsing modules.