RoboTask has powerful tools of interactive automation, such as «Send Keystroke» operations and the mouse actions (Move, Move to object, Click). However, it is obviously not convenient to create an incremental task that implies mouse shortcuts. Sometimes several operations need to be performed as a single block.
For example:
| • | Activate the contextual menu; |
| • | Select the menu item; |
| • | Click on the needed element of the pop-up dialog. |
In a step-by-step configuration, it is rather difficult to hit the required menu item.
To simplify the creation of the interactive mouse shortcuts sequence you can use the automatic macro recording feature by clicking on «Record a macro» button in the task editor. Macro recorder allows automatic recording of the sequence of mouse pointer movements: namely, mouse button ups and downs, pauses between the shortcuts. When the recording is over Macro Recorder transforms the recorded macro into actions and specifies them as the task steps.
To record the mouse shortcuts do the following:
| • | Open the task editor |
| • | Click «Record a macro». At that, all the RoboTask windows will be hidden and the window with start and stop recording buttons will be displayed. |
| • | Click on start recording button  . |
| • | Then make the required mouse shortcuts (mouse pointer movements and pressing the buttons on the required window elements) and click on stop recording button  . |
| • | When the recording is over Macro Recorder will recover the task editor window and insert the recorded shortcuts into the editor. |
As a rule, the recorded macro is ready to use. However, it is strongly recommended to edit the created steps manually. Macro Recorder records the actions properties exactly as they were made, and that is not always useful for the task creation.
For example, in such action as «Move to Object» it is almost always needed to replace the full title bar with the specific title bar fragment. It should be done because the Windows application windows almost always change their title according to the window contents or the context. If the window properties are left unchanged, during the operation flow RoboTask may not find the window according to the properties. In this case, the task will be stopped with an error.
It is also useful to edit the pauses between the operations. As a rule, they can be significantly reduced to speed up the task execution. However, it is not recommended to remove the pauses at all, because you should wait a certain period of time until the application can respond to the mouse shortcut (e. g. load some data or open a new window).
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