Xill tutorials & example projects

Are you done setting up the Xill IDE? Did you start your first project? Then following this tutorial here is probably the best way to proceed. Let's start by taking a look at a very simple robot. Copy (doubleclick to select) and paste the code in the IDE for more accurate highlighting. ...

Introduction The console is a very important part of the IDE to monitor what goes on in a running robot. What shows up in the console Compile-time errors do not go in the console. Runtime errors do, and also the function System.print outputs to it. Log levels All console entries have a le...

Introduction Using Xill, it is important to be able to work with list and object variables, together also called 'collections'. They are used often when processing information that is not only atomic (like strings and numbers) but also part of a data structure or record that belongs tog...

Accessing the file system and modifying files with Xill is usually pretty easy and straightforward. Every function is included in the File package. Moving files around Simple modifications of the file structure can be done with the following functions: File.copy(from,to) File.delete(path) ...

To automate Excel sheet processing, Xill has all basic functionality built in. You can program Xill robots to read cells out of sheets, edit them or build new Excel files. Available functions Omitting some details about the possible parameters, the following is what you can do with the Excel p...

This String package is different from all the other packages. The String package is a collection of useful functions that will be used all the way through your code. A lot of the times you just need one String function. That's why we chose to show you a list of small examples of where the St...

Introduction Automating a lot of XML and HTML processing is an important goal of Xill. You can crawl and scrape websites, get exactly the parts of content you need from pages, APIs or feeds, and let robots build new XML or clean/change HTML. This article aims to give a complete impression of th...

Introduction Xill IDE has a pretty extensive web browsing kit included in the Web package. You can load pages with it and interact with buttons and other page elements, like form fields. Xillio uses these functions mostly for website crawling and data extraction, but you could also develop thin...

Introduction This article gives a practical example of the functionality described in the language documentation about include. The code of this example is kept as simple as possible, focusing on being a guide of correct library usage. All action steps you should follow are in a numbered l...

For this tutorial we will use a simple filesystem crawler that stores the information it finds in the UDM. Before you head off and start working on the code, please check that you meet the following two requirements: MongoDB is installed on your system You have a tool such as Robo...

Introduction When you are doing a migration project, you often feel the need for speed, requiring you to write robot code that is as efficient as possible. In order to gain insight into which parts of your code take up the largest chunk of the total running time, additional profiling code ...

When directly dumping an entire database is not possible, a so-called crawler is needed. These robots are given a starting point and 'crawl around' the source objects until every bit of content is accessed. This article shows how to create a basic crawler for disk drives or network locat...

Introduction The REST package has been deprecated as of Xill IDE version 3.1. It has been replaced by the XURL package. REST is used to execute one of the four CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) actions towards online content. In REST these four actions are: post get put delete...

The XURL package has replaced the REST package from Xill IDE version 3.1 onwards. The XURL package is used to send HTTP requests and get a response from the server. The following requests are available: Delete: to delete a resource; Get: to retrieve resources; Head: to retrieve the head...

Introduction Often when working with collections of data, like documents or entries in a database, operations are applied to individual items. Traditionally this is done in Xill using a foreach loop, but the built-in pipeline functions can make these tasks less verbose and easier. Using these...