Robots Automate Without APIs

How Robots Fit into a Broader Automation Strategy

A robot is another tool in your toolbox for automating your business processes.

With robots and integrations, you can automate everything, from robust enterprise software with extensive APIs to legacy systems without any APIs.

Your automation work fits into one of the following categories:

UI-based automation

When you're automating an application that doesn't have APIs for your specific business process, build a robot, and specify the workflow from within the application user interface.
API-based automation

When you're automating an application that has APIs for your specific business process, design an integration, and call the APIs from the integration.

If you have business processes that you've been unable to automate because the applications don't have APIs, robots are a game changer.

Already Familiar with Integrations?

If you've built integrations before, you're already an expert in robots. Robots and integrations provide two ways to automate your business and have many commonalities. For example:

You build integrations and robots in projects.
The canvases where you build integrations and robots have the same look and feel.
Integrations and robots both require connections to connect to applications.
You deploy integrations and robots the same way.
The observability pages are the same for integrations and robots.

Additionally, robots and integrations complete the same type of work, including the following:

Automating your business processes by connecting to applications, getting information from the applications, and passing the information back to Oracle Integration.
Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your business and offering valuable insight into your business processes.

When to Build a Robot

When creating a robot, you specify the steps that a human takes when interacting with a user interface. For example, open a browser, enter data into a field, and click a button.

Build a robot when an application doesn't have APIs, when the APIs are inaccessible, or when integration development resources aren't available.

See When to Create Robots Versus Integrations.

Robots Require Integrations

In Oracle Integration, automation begins with an integration. Even if you're automating a business process with a single robot, the only way to run the robot is to call it from an integration.

While this approach might seem like extra work, the work is an investment in the future of your business processes. For example:

Integrations provide robust observability capabilities to monitor your operations
Consider a scenario in which a robot creates an order and a process application calls the robot.

In this scenario, if the robot no longer meets your organization's needs and needs to be reconfigured as an integration, you also must update the process application to call the integration instead. Updating your process application when your business needs change can lead to interruptions in your business processes.

Instead, with Oracle Integration, the process application calls an integration, and the integration calls a robot. If you need to switch from UI-based automation to API-based automation, all you need to do is modify the integration so that it calls an integration instead of a robot.

Enjoy Simplicity While Gaining Control

Most robots in the automation industry record one path through a user interface. If you want the robot to take a different path, you must build another robot. Before you know it, you've built an army of robots that can complete only very specific tasks and can't do anything when the application that they automate goes down.

Robots in Oracle Integration are different. They combine the simplicity of a recording with the control of a low-code environment. To create a recording, simply work in an application as users normally do. Oracle Integration generates the code for this automation as you work, providing you with valuable knowledge of how the automation code works. As you work, tweak the automation and define parameters for the automation using an intuitive low-code editor.

When you finish creating the recording, you've also finished your automation work. Instead of creating an army of robots, you've created one robot that can handle numerous use cases.

Because you call every robot from an integration, you can incorporate fault handlers and error management to gracefully handle all the situations that the robot might encounter. And, thanks to consistent user interfaces and terminology between integrations and robots, integration developers typically can learn how to build robots very quickly.

Even better? You build robots from within Oracle Integration, without needing to install a special additional application.