Are you an expat living in a big city in a foreign country? Have you ever wanted to find a doctor nearby which speaks your language? Or maybe you are a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) developer and would like to create a quick, useful application that can solve some challenges you face in your personal life?
I am not sure which language you speak or which doctor you need, but I hope you can learn from my example below which describes how I created a bot in 5 minutes that scraped all the Russian-speaking physicians in Berlin and put the results onto a dedicated map.
Prerequisites:
- The need to locate a list of some data on the map with the correlated data.
- UiPath Community Edition (free for individual developers).
- Some very basic understanding of RPA and ability to create at least a simple workflow in UiPath (you can watch free tutorials at UiPath Academy).
Steps:
I. Find a website which would contain information that you are searching for.
Example: this website contains a database of the Russian-speaking doctors (e.g., physicians) in Berlin.
II. Create the following sequence in UiPath:
1 — Activity “Open Browser”
After you find the website containing information that you are searching for, it is necessary to open this website and read all the necessary data.
Example Properties:
In this example I used Internet Explorer (IE) for the BrowserType. However, other browsers, such as Google Chrome, can also be used.
Don’t forget to create the output variable (shortcut Ctr+K), e.g., browser_Dr.
2 — Activity “Extract Structured Data”
Please note that the necessary data on the website that you found can span across multiple web-pages. As next step, we would like to save this data for further use. That’s where the power of UiPath can bring value, since it makes the scraping of data from multiple pages very easy!
Example Properties:
In order to extract data from the web page, I have utilized the Extract Data activity. If you need further help with this activity, please watch the tutorials from the UiPath Academy.
Don’t forget to create the output variable (shortcut Ctr+K), e.g., ExtractDataTable.
3 — Activity “Write Range”
As the next step we want to save the output data table from the previous step in a dedicated Excel-file.
Example Properties:
Here, fill in Input -> DataTable with the variable from the previous step (ExtractDataTable in our example).
Select Options -> AddHeaders as we need this information for the future pinning of the data on a map.
III. Find some online service which allows to add your own map pins.
There exist a lot of free services that allow users to map multiple locations from Excel data.
Example: https://batchgeo.com/
Simply copy the created Excel-file from Step 3 or drag-and-drop it over to BatchGeo to create a pin map.
Click “Map now”.
The example result which shows the map of Berlin containing Russian-speaking physicians is presented below:
The link to the interactive map will be sent to your email. You can also view the resulting interactive map here.
This is just one example of how I used Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to solve a problem which I had. This made my life a little bit easier by extracting and presenting public information on the Internet for my own purpose. Perhaps you have your own itch to scratch through RPA?
Do you have your own examples of how you used Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions to make your life easier? Share it in the comments, your experience would be very welcome!
