Mapping Business Web Applications for Web Automation
摘要
This paper presents an automated tool designed to create conceptual maps of business web applications. These maps illustrate, in an abstract and hierarchical manner, the functional navigation and operational paths within the application’s user interface (UI). The map presents in a structural way the functionalities of the business web application. Our tool automatically navigates through the UI of the target business web application, mapping UI operations to conceptual operations in the underlying database. The resulting conceptual map is presented in either a graphical or serialized form. This map serves as documentation for the business web application, enabling new users to quickly acquire the knowledge needed to navigate and operate the application’s UI screens. A second usage of this conceptual map that is demonstrated in the paper comes in the context of RPA (Robotic Process Automation). Our automated tool is able to execute automatically simple processes on the target business web application, this simple automated processes being described as paths in this hierarchical conceptual map.