Edit

Share via

UI elements collections in desktop flows (preview)

  • Article

[This topic is prerelease documentation and is subject to change.]

UI elements collections developed by organization users and published to the respective environments can be included in desktop flows.

In Power Automate for desktop, UI elements are elements that are grabbed and captured from the various user interfaces (either desktop applications or web pages). These elements can be text fields, buttons, links, or anything else that you can interact with in the target applications.

After these elements are captured, they can be associated with the respective UI or web automation actions, so that the corresponding interaction with the said elements can be automated in the context of desktop flows.

Previously, UI elements were only available separately to each desktop flow. This means that they needed to be captured individually in the context of each desktop flow built, even if the elements happened to be exactly the same among multiple desktop flows. To avoid this, UI elements collections now offer makers and admins the ability to have control and central management over 'groups' of UI elements, which can be shared across multiple users and imported in multiple desktop flows as reusable components. In this way, in case of an application update for instance, the UI elements collection only needs a one-time adjustment - all desktop flows referencing this collection in the same environment should then reflect that change automatically.

Important

  • This is a preview feature.
  • Preview features aren’t meant for production use and may have restricted functionality. These features are available before an official release so that customers can get early access and provide feedback.

UI elements collections exist at the environment level. As a best practice, use a "dev—test—prod" model when deploying UI elements collections.

Prerequisites

  • Power Automate for desktop 2.43 or later.
  • This feature requires an environment where the Power Automate v2 schema is enabled. In v1 schema environments, UI elements collections aren't available.
  • An Attended RPA license is required to include and use UI elements collections in desktop flows, given that access to the flow designer of Power Automate for desktop is needed.

Known limitations

  • Upload date might differ in the portal than what is shown in the Assets library inside Power Automate for desktop.

Next steps

Create and publish UI elements collections

See also