Power Automate UI Flows

Microsoft has announced the August 2020 update for UI flows.

UI Flows take advantage of the robotic process automation (RPA) capability of Power Automate so that companies can focus on higher-value work by automating a time-consuming manual processes.

With August 2020 update, Microsoft has made several updates to the UI flows functionality as noted down below.

  • Cancel UI flow runs that are in progress

UI Flows runs can now be cancelled when the parent Flow run is cancelled. This will allow you stop the run of a UI Flow if it’s stuck or if there are any issues with the preceding actions or conditions in the parent Flow.

Go to the specific Flow run you want to cancel and click on the Cancel button. If the UI Flows was running, it will get cancelled. This might take some time as there is logic that needs to be run to ensure that your session on the target machine is closed in a clean way.

  • Add and edit Image Recognition actions that are part of a Remote Desktop or Citrix recording

Add and edit Image Recognition actions: Create a recording of a remote desktop. You can now open the details of a step after recording and edit the click location of the image recognition action, or click “Add an action” within a scope to manually add new actions to the scope. When adding an image recognition action, you’ll need to upload a .JPG screenshot and define the click coordinates for the action that will be used during playback.

  • Native support for recording actions and data from SAP

Native support for recording actions and data from SAP: UI flows can now leverage SAPGUI scripting capabilities to automate SAP applications. Ensure you have SAP client 7.40 or higher installed on your machine. You also need to enable SAP client scripting. You can do so by clicking on SAP GUI Options and navigating to Accessibility & Scripting –> Scripting. Then under User Settings, check Enable scripting and uncheck all other sub-options.

Once SAPGUI scripting is enabled, simply launch the UI flow recorder, and record the steps you want to automate with SAP by performing keyboard inputs and mouse clicks on SAPGUI. If your UI flow script contains SAP actions, you will see two additional actions, SetProperty and CallMethod, added to your UI flow recording.

  • Do Until feature to have more control over how UI flows execute.

In UI flows, users can add a Do Until action to configure repeating action(s). The feature requires a control condition that governs running the loops and configuration to define the maximum number of loops and runtime. Users can either click Add an action or drag and drop another action to add it into the Do Until loop.

Do Until action in UI Flows