How To Use Hot Key Trigger In Automation Anywhere

Introduction

This article describes how to use 'Hot Key Trigger' in Automation Anywhere using community edition. Sometimes we need to perform some actions based on some key combination events so I will explain the same in this article.

If you are a beginner then need to check this article Getting Started Robotic Process Automation using Automation Anywhere to create environment of Automation Anywhere.

Create a New bot

After logging Automation anywhere account through cloud community edition link,

You will see a Dashboard as shown in below image and you can create a new bot through the highlighted button 'create a bot',

Bot Configuration

After clicking on 'create a bot' button, you will get a popup window. It will ask some information about bot which you want to create like-

• Name of bot
• Description of bot(optional)
• Folder location of bot

After clicking on choose option, a popup window will show where you can browse 'CSharpCorner' folder and click on choose to set a default location for your new bot.

After creating bot, we will create Hot key trigger through below steps

• Add Hot Key Trigger
• Configure Hot Key Trigger with some key combination
• Add a message box to show after pressing Hot Key

Note: Top section of workspace is related with triggers only.

Add Hot Key Trigger

Let's go to left side 'Trigger' pane and find 'Hot Key' Trigger. Drag & drop 'Hot Key Trigger' into workspace.

Configure Hot Key Trigger

Now we will fill configure the trigger with some key of the keyboard-

• Select 'ctrl'
• Select 'A' from dropdown

Note: Here we can select any key combination with Hot key or multiple Hot keys.

Add a message box to show after pressing Hot Key

At last, we will add 'MessageBox' through action pane to display a message like 'Hot Key Pressed' after pressing 'Hot key' combination.

To run any bot, we have 2 options

• Run now: It runs bot without triggers
• Run with triggers: It runs bot with triggers

We have to use 'Run with triggers' option and after running bot, bot will try to listen the trigger event (ctrl + A in our example).

And after pressing 'ctrl + A' key combination, we will get below message box as an output.

We have couple of other triggers like,

• Email
• Files & Folders
• Interface
• Process
• Service
• Window

Conclusion

In this article, how to use 'Hot Key Trigger' in environment of Automation Anywhere.