openrpa and AHK via UiPath open-sourced activities

[burque505]

Take a look here for info on openrpa. Still in alpha but fast and powerful, and attracting worldwide interest.
Amazingly, UiPath's open-sourced Script Activities (basically AutoHotkey and Powerpoint for my purposes), drop in and just work. (I have had to add a new function to AutoHotkey.Interop (wrapper around AutoHotkey.dll's ahkReady() function, which is missing from the AutoHotkey.Interop package on github. I recompiled the UiPath Community Activities to include it, so I could drop in the new dll.)
Just a couple of teasers - this is AHK using EPPlus creating a COM object inside openrpa to make Excel create a pivot table. The script will probably look really strange with its function and SetTimer calls. These are needed to avoid asynchronous call problems here (and UiPath for that matter). You can either run an AHK script or access functions from one, which is what I did here. Many thanks to @LuisSalas for his CommentBox() script, I really like it and I used it here. The AHK script and the Excel file I used should be in the ZIP archive.

EDIT: EPPlus not required. Straight COM object creation to run Excel.

openrpa_shrunk.png (123.38 KiB) Viewed 6454 times

pivot_table_shrunk.png (34.14 KiB) Viewed 6458 times

[tank]

Wow thank you
It still amazes me that this industry has more akin to the wild west than anything. There isnt even a standard definition for a bot or a common theme to license models. These free RPA solutions that pop up are really disruptive to the big boy's lease on control

[burque505]

I'm willing to bet the Python-based solutions like Automagica, pybotlib, TagUI Python, and so on are going to start making inroads also.