Selectors, UiExplorer:

A selector is basically a plain text that is used to find a particular UI element among the running applications.

It consists of an XML fragment specifying a few attributes of the UI element you are looking for and of some of its parents.

UiExplorer is a tool for  inspecting applications' UI hierarchy, for obtaining or improving selectors that UiPath identifies UiElementswith.

Most often, the selectors you are working with will have been composed automatically.

Just as often, they should be sufficient for your needs, as is the case of applications with static user interface. However, some applications have changing layouts and attribute nodes with volatile values; such is the case of some web-apps, but not only – that make automatic generation of reliable selectors impossible — UiPath can't predict how an attribute's value will change along the runtime, or between runs of an app.

Editing selectors in these cases can be bothersome, difficult and time consuming.

We built UiExplorer to make work easier for this task: it conveniently exposes node values, position, and can sometimes even repair selectors automatically, with minimal input from the developer.

Selectors are automatically generated by the Selection tool in UiExplorer, but you can also edit them manually using the Selector Editor.




To create a customized selector, we recommend starting from an automatically generated selector and then change a few of the attributes.

Performing a type into the notepad window generates in UiPath the corresponding Type action.

Using UiExplorer, we can generate full selectors. For example, let`s get a selector for the editable field of the Notepad application.



You can see in the screenshot that the Select Control Interactive button from UiExplorer generated a full selector that is like a XML text. You can find here the full list of different tags that a selector may have.

Let`s see how the selector is generated for a simple Type into activity into the editable field of Notepad.

This activity, like any other activity, has editable properties. 

Here, we have the selector property which we can edit by clicking the ellipsis button on the right side. A new window will pop-up.

As you can see, this activity provides a full selector, just like UiExplorer.