Open

The Open step is deprecated. This step is now replaced with several other steps, each of which is dedicated to a separate application. Each step provides a set of options required to automate the dedicated application:

Browse step that opens websites.
Excel step that helps you work with spreadsheets.
Document Transformation step that helps you extract and use information from images and text documents.
KTA step that helps you work with a Kofax TotalAgility (KTA) Server.
Terminal step that connects to and automates a terminal.
Windows step that helps you work with a Windows desktop and run Windows applications.

Note that you can use your robots with the Open step, but you cannot create a new Open step.

Properties

Device

Select the device where you want to open an application.

URI

Specify the path to the application or a website to open. Use forward slashes in the path. For example:
- C:/Program Files/SAP/FrontEnd/SAPgui/saplogon.exe
- ="C:/Program Files/SAP/FrontEnd/SAPgui/saplogon.exe"
- https://www.google.com
- about://version
  See Access Websites for more information.
For the built-in Windows applications, you can specify the process name, such as calc.exe.
To open built-in Excel driver, specify the following:

excel://new to create a new spreadsheet

excel://<full path to spreadsheet>/<spreadsheet name>.xlsx to open an existing spreadsheet

For more information, see Excel supplemental documentation.
For the RDP connection, specify the following:

rdp://<domain>\<username>:<password>@<hostname>?<param1>=<value1>&<param2>=<value2>

Where available parameters are:
- d: domain (or type domain as part of username in URL)
- g: desktop geometry (WxH)
- a: connection color depth
- Z: specify a number of seconds to wait before dismissing an extra screen during login (see below)
- kapow-keep-awake: Specify the number of seconds between the dummy keystrokes to keep the RDP session alive. Default is 30 seconds. To turn off keystrokes, specify zero (0), such as kapow-keep-awake=0.
For example: rdp://admin:AdminPassword@Server1

If the password or host name contains characters not accepted in an URL, such as a backslash, they must be encoded.

If the system you are connecting to is configured to show an extra screen when the user logs in, set a number of seconds to wait before dismissing the extra screen during login in the Z parameter, such as rdp://admin:AdminPassword@Server1?Z=3. If this screen is not dismissed, the action may fail.
- The Open step with an RDP connection waits until the connection is established before continuing robot execution. If remote connection fails, an error message is provided.
- Always use the same explicitly-specified resolution and color depth parameters for the RDP connection. Windows 8 and 10 do not support color depth lower than 32 bit. Therefore, the request from the RDP to change connection color depth will be ignored for these versions of Windows.

Also use the Open step to work with cookies in the Chromium built-in browser. See Cookie Management in the built-in browser for more details.