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Important:

Objects Browser is currently an Experimental feature currently under development and subject to change. Such beta features are not supported for Enterprise customers. Projects which use this feature are not guaranteed to be backward compatible with future iterations of Studio. Object Browser is currently available only with a Community license.

The Objects Browser can be used for managing, reusing, and increasing the reliability of UI Descriptors in your project. Using the Objects Browser you can add UI Descriptors to UI repositories and extract UI libraries for global reuse.

UI Elements added to such UI libraries represent selectors commonly used in multiple workflows. With Objects Browser, such elements don't need to be indicated again, they can be dragged from the UI library into activities in the Designer panel.

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Note:

Objects Browser only works with UiPath.UIAutomation.Activities, UiPath.UIAutomationNext.Activities or UiPath.MobileAutomation.Activities packages versions 20.4 and above.

Reusability

Application screens and full or partial selectors from the workflow are mapped in the UI Objects Browser panel. From here, they can be added to the project as UI Descriptors and dragged and dropped inside activities in the Designer panel.

To reuse such descriptors in other workflows add the screens and UI elements to the Snippets panel. To share across the organization publish the UI descriptors as a library and install it as a dependency in other projects.

Key Concepts

UI Descriptors

UI Descriptors are extracted from activities in the workflow and added to a structured schema that groups them by UI Applications, Screens, and UI Elements. UI Descriptors can be either:

• Selectors Targets - UI Descriptors specific to UIAutomation package, that contain the entire Target information;
• Partial Selector Targets - UI Descriptors specific to UIAutomation package, that contain the entire Target information, but depend on a screen/parent selector;
• Unified Targets - UI Descriptors specific to UIAutomationNext package, that contain information about the target element and associated anchors;
• Computer Vision Targets - UI Descriptors specific to UIAutomation package, that use machine learning and image detection and contain image metadata.

UI Descriptors can be part of:

• one project for wide reuse;
• global repositories for testing purposes;
• part of UI Libraries for global cross-project sharing.

UI Elements

UI Elements can contain multiple UI Object Descriptors, which comprises of full or partial element selectors, anchor selectors, screen and element image capture context, other metadata such as application and application version. In short, any descriptor that helps you identify a selector on the screen, grouped under one single UI Element.

Screens

Screens are UI Scopes that are extracted from activities inside the workflow that have a scope. A Screen can contain multiple UI Descriptors. Similar to UI Descriptors, screens can be either:

• Browser Targets - Screen Descriptors specific to the Attach Browser activity from the UIAutomation package;
• Window Target - Screen Descriptors specific to the Attach Window activity from the UIAutomation package;
• Application Target - Screen Descriptors specific to the Open Application activity from the UIAutomation package;
• Computer Vision Target + Selector Target - Screen Descriptors specific to the CV scope activity from the UIAutomation package;
• Application Unified Target - Screen Descriptor specific to Use Application / Browser activity from the UIAutomationNext package.

UI Applications

A UI Application is a targeted application that can have multiple versions and each version can have multiple screens.

The structure of UI libraries created with the Object Browser has the following hierarchy: Application > Screen > UI Element > UI Descriptor.

UI Libraries

A UI Library is an encapsulation of UI Descriptors grouped by applications, application versions, and screens. UI Descriptors that you define can be extracted as a UI Library, which after publishing can be installed in other projects as a dependency.

A UI Library may contain several applications with their own Screens and UI Elements, but can contain only one version of an application.