Guide automation allows guide builders to set up automated clicks and automated text fills of specified form elements, streamlining repetitive tasks and allowing your end-users to enter information with a single button selection.
This ensures accurate data entry, reduces repetition and copy-pasting to maintain consistent formatting, and increases data quality. All this enhances reporting clarity and supports organizational compliance.
This article details how to create automations for a guide.
Add the Automation button action
Automation always applies to a guide button action. As a guide builder, you can have multiple automation buttons in a step if, for example, you know you'll have multiple user types filling out a form, such as part-time employees and full-time employees. You can configure different buttons to populate and select different information, either in the same fields or across different fields.
This example shows the automation for a new sales opportunity, where the end-user is required to select the opportunity type. The form has multiple buttons and populates automatically with information that was defined for the selected button.
To automate a guide, go to Guides > Guides and:
- In the Guides page, select an existing guide from the Guides list, or alternatively, select Create guide. For more information, see Create a guide.
- In the guide’s settings page, select Manage in my app. The Visual Design Studio opens.
- Select a guide step, or add a new step.
- Add a building block and in the Edit Container modal, select Button.
- From the Actions dropdown, select Automation. This updates the existing button action to Automation. Users can now add automations that'll run when the button is selected.
Configure an automation
You can configure an Automation button to do one or both of the following when the user selects it:
- Autofill. Add static text to input fields that you configure to autofill.
- Autoclick. Preselect clickable or selectable elements, such as checkboxes or dropdown menu items.
To configure automation:
- In the Edit Button modal, select Configure Automation.
- In Configure Automation Settings, select Add selection.
- From the dropdown list, select Target element or Select existing Feature. We recommend using Features that are already tagged.
- In your form, select the element you want to autofill or autoclick. The CSS selector for the selected anchor element is added to Configure Automation Settings.
- Select Name this automation item to provide a name for your automation. Verify that the element path rule is valid.
- If the automation is an autofill, enter the text you want to add to the text field. This can be text that the user doesn't need to worry about, or it could be prompt text, such as what type of information to enter or a template description.
- Repeat the process to create automation for additional fields with the same automation button.
- Select Done to finish.
Note: Adopt retries the automation if the element that you've configured to autofill or autoclick isn’t found immediately. If the element isn’t found after retrying, the automation fails. The end user isn't informed that an element failed to autofill or autoclick and can still complete these manually.
Reorder the automations
You can reorder the automations by dragging and dropping them up and down the list. This creates an automation queue, accounting for dynamic elements and for conditional logic in a form.
Add additional buttons
You can add additional automation buttons and other button actions to advance your guide:
- To add additional automation buttons, select the plus (+) icon next to an existing button and select Automation from the dropdown menu.
- If you want to advance your guide to show the user more information after they select the automation button, you can add a button action by selecting + Action. For example, you might want to inform the user of which fields they still need to fill out for themselves. The additional actions available for an automation button are either Next Step, Go to Step, and Previous Step.