Steps

A robot is made up of steps, which are building blocks in a robot program.

A step works on a robot state and processes it according to the configuration of the step. A step has an input robot state and generates an output robot state.

Steps have a step name, an underlying action, and various properties, depending on the step type. The step name provides a symbolic name for the step, such as "Extract Headline" and "Load Search Page." The step is the action that the step performs. For example, an Extract Value action of Robots can extract a value of an element from a web page and store it in a variable.

The finders find the elements, such as HTML tags or Excel cells, in the page that the step should work on. Some steps require a single element, whereas others can handle more than one element.

A step is an executable element. A step that is executed accepts a robot state as input and, by applying the finders and step in turn, produces an output robot state. The output robot state is then passed to the following step and becomes its input robot state. Some steps are "termed loop" actions and steps having such actions are called "loop steps." A Loop step may generate zero or more output robot states, and cause the following steps to be executed once for each of them.

You can group steps together in expandable Group steps.