From the course: UiPath: Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Workflow overview - UiPath Tutorial

From the course: UiPath: Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

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Workflow overview

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- [Bryan] When you start building robots that do many things, you're definitely going to want to know about reusable workflows. Creating reusable workflows allows us to deconstruct one large robot into smaller moving parts. Thinking ahead and breaking our robots down into smaller pieces will allow us to reduce complexity. It also allows us to avoid repeating the same steps many times over and over again in the same robot. The reason why repeating the same steps over and over again can be a bad thing is that if it turns out that one or two of the steps of a collection of steps needs to be updated, then you've got to perform those updates in every group of repeated steps within the robot. The better approach would be to create that set of steps one time, and then find a way to reuse that container of steps over and over again, so that way you could change the steps in the container and it would get updated in all the places that we used it. If you've taken my tech primer course, you've seen the small demos I've done of functions or methods in programming, and reusable workflows are very similar to functions or methods in programming. Ultimately, reusable workflows are a collection of activities that can be used over and over again within a larger process. And like I mentioned before, if you change that collection of activities, every place in your larger process where it's used will take advantage of that update without you having to go and change all of the repeating steps. Much like a function call or a method call in programming, we'll be able to pass data into and out of any given instance of a reusable workflow. And this is very similar to the concept of arguments and return statements in programming. The key to all this is the Invoke Workflow activity. This is going to allow us to open a new project and create and save a workflow that does some smaller portion of our overall process and then create a different project that uses the smaller process we created in the first project. Let's dive into a simple example so you can see how it works.

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