✓ RPA Challenge 6 - Smart clipboard

RPA Challenge
#1

Hi! Here is me, here is Monday, here is new RPA Challenge!

I believe you will like this challenge! It is rather simple and useful! :innocent:

Task

I want you to create a little robot, that will run in the background and every time a specific shortcut is pressed, it will paste predefined text. Imagine how often you type in same things again and again. Like your email address, phone number, signature, greeting…

Use shortcut combinations that do not do anything in your system yet. For example:

  • CTRL + ALT + numeric keyboard numbers

This part may be more challenging than you would guess! I guess you will explore some shortcuts that you had no idea that exist.

Store at least 4 different texts in an input file that is easily editable (like Excel sheet or CSV file) and assign shortcuts to them.
You can use:

  • email address
  • phone number
  • greetings (as Best regards, Kind regards)
  • some sentence that you repeat for ever and ever (I love you honey! :stuck_out_tongue: )
  • be creative! :wink:

:no_entry_sign: Avoid storing passwords in plain text! (You use this robot to type in passwords, but only if you do it in a way that it cannot be abused, like using Type Secure activity and have them stored securely eg. in Orchestrator)

Of course, for purpose of this challenge, you can make up all the things, it does not have to be real address or phone number.

How to participate?

When you are done, please send me your code to PM.

And as usual - first 3 correct, original solutions earn 3 robopoints, next get 1 robopoint.
Check the Leaderboard here.

Challenge deadline is 24.4. by the end of the day. You can still submit your projects after the deadline but you cannot earn robopoints. New challenge is published every week or 2 weeks so don’t worry if you did not catch this one. Keep in mind, your submitted files may be published after the deadline so others can learn from solutions.

3 Likes
#2

That was a difficult one ! Needed to explore several python librairies.
I used the shortcuts “CTRL + numeric keyboard numbers” instead, because the “CTRL+ALT+num” is already used by most windows application to write special characters (and I don’t know how to cancel it).
v2PyShortcutRobot.zip (495 Bytes)

4 Likes
#3

This is very nicely done!

I was trying to solve this using python, specifically Listener from pynput and pyautogui but it seems like overkill now, I had some issue with it as well…

But this is great code, thnx!

#4

Thanks! This is actually a line I stole from a sample code in the keyboard library documentation (keyboard · PyPI). Yes I tried with pynput as well and got very weird result… Please let me know if you manage do to do it with pynput. Thanks :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#5

Hey Roman,
this was a nice one! You got my code in your PM!

1 Like
#6

:watch: Time is up!

Thank you for your participation! I hope you may use this small bot to help you in your daily work!
We had 2 challengers this time:
@pmontez that mastered this with just few lines of code in Python! + 3 robopoints
and @anna.hal that went with UiPath, Parallel activity and Keypress trigger. This solution is nice! I like how you first put the text into clipboard and then paste it at once. +3 robopoints

In UiPath, Type Into activity, surprisingly, can work without specified selector. The Robot will just try to type to current active window. Just as you would type.

@anna.hal also nicely used the hotkey CTRL+V → "[d(ctrl)]v[u(ctrl)]" to paste the clipboard.

This challenge is tricky since we first press some keys and then we want the robot to also press some keys right after that. It can cause problems since in a first miliseconds, we still hold the shortcut keys.

I hope you enjoyed this one! And I am looking forward to see your solutions at RPA Challenge 7 - Corrupted Data that still has a week to go! :slightly_smiling_face:

You can still post your solution and practice RPA with this task!

Here is the → Leaderboard ←

1 Like