Introduction
This is the first of beginner tutorials, which will guide you safely through your first project with Kofax Kapow. In this video you will get an overview of the workflow involved when working with Kofax Kapow along with an introduction to the main program called Design Studio. Before watching these tutorials, make sure you have installed and set up Kofax Kapow correctly.
Kofax Kapow is a platform, which enables you to fully automate any process that you would be able to perform in a browser via your mouse and keyboard.
Please sit back and watch as you are taken through the general procedure from idea to automated process.
It all starts with an idea of a process you want to automate. In these Beginner Tutorials we want to automatically extract the most recent stories from a website called News Magazine.
Our first step is to check the website. What exactly do we want to do?
When we feel confident about what we want to achieve, we open Design Studio, the program to create automated processes. The first time you open Design Studio, you get a welcome screen, which links to this Beginner Tutorials, along with the rest of the documentation. Click OK and you can see the main window of Design Studio.
On the left side you have the projects view. Right now it contains only the default project which includes a collection of example files and a Tutorials folder where samples of the files we will be creating in these Beginner Tutorials can be found.
Double clicking the file called Post.type in the projects view, opens it in the type editor, which is used to edit and create this kind of file. A type defines what kind of data can be stored in a variable of that type. If you are unfamiliar with types and variables, you can think of a variable as a bucket which can hold objects, like text or images, and the type can be thought of as the mold which produces that type of bucket.
This particular type is designed to contain the information we are going to extract from News Magazine. In one of the tutorials we will be creating a type.
The extraction of stories from News Magazine is performed by an automated process called a robot. Think of a robot as an automation of any process you would perform in a web browser.
Double clicking the file called NewsMagazine.robot, also from the Tutorials folder, opens up the robot editor, which is used to edit and create robot files.
The Robot View at the top of the editor displays the structure of the robot. Each step corresponds to an action performed by the robot. Going through the steps in the Robot View the robot loads News Magazine, navigates to the most recent articles and extracts a title and a preview from each story by using a loop. The robot then finally returns the collected values
Clicking the second step in the Robot View executes the Load Page action and we see News Magazine loads in the Browser View below. As we will see later, the Browser View makes it really intuitive to build a robot.
The Robot Beginner's tutorial shows you how to build this robot yourself.
Once we have automated the process of extraction with the robot, we will upload the robot to the Management Console. The Management Console is a web-based application for managing the operational aspects of Kofax Kapow. From the robot, we can create a Kapplet, which publishes the robot as an app for yourself and others to use.
The final product will be a Kapplet that automatically extracts the most recent stories from News Magazine and returns them for the user to view and download.
You are now ready to start building your first robot. Start the Beginner Tutorials by watching the Robot Beginner's Tutorial.