This section contains an overview of Kapow Katalyst followed by three tutorials that will guide you through your first project in Kapow Katalyst. Click the videos, like the one below, to play them. Click the link in the bottom right corner of the page when you are ready to go to the next tutorial video.

On each page you will also find a transcript of the video.

Introduction

This is the first of four beginner tutorials which will guide you safely through your first project with Kapow Katalyst. In this first video, you will get an overview of the workflow involved when working with Kapow Katalyst along with an introduction to the main program called Design Studio.

Kapow Katalyst is very simply stated a platform which enables you to fully automate any process that you would be able to perform in a browser, but in practice it reaches much further than that.

Please sit back and watch as you are taken through the general procedure from idea to automated process.

Workflow

1 IDEA:

It all starts with an idea of a process you want to automate. In these Beginner Tutorials we want to automatically extract the most recent stories from a website called News Magazine and store them in a database.

Our first step will be to check out the website. What exactly do we want?

2 DESIGN STUDIO:

When we feel confident about what we want to achieve, we will open Design Studio, the program used to create automated processes. In windows, Design Studio can be found from the start menu, in the Kapow Katalyst folder, under all programs.

The first time you open Design Studio you will get a welcome screen which links to this Beginner Tutorial, along with the rest of the documentation. Click OK and you will be able to see the main window of Design Studio.

Going through the different components we have the projects view at the top left side of the window. Right now it contains only the default project which includes a collection of example files.

Below the projects view we have the database view. It contains the Development Database which we will be using to store data into in these tutorials.

Let's take sneak peak at the files we will be creating during the tutorials. Samples of these files are included with Design Studio when you install it. Going back to the projects view they can be found in the Beginner Tutorials folder of the default project.

3 TYPE:

Double clicking the file called post.type in the projects view, opens the type editor, which is used to edit and create this kind of file. You can think of a type as a bucket which can contain information, like text or images. This particular type is designed to contain the information we will be extracting from News Magazine. In the very last tutorial we will get into the process of creating a type.

4 ROBOT:

The extraction of stories from News Magazine is performed by an automated process called a robot. Think of a robot as an automation of any process you would perform in a web browser.

Double clicking the file called NewsMagazine.robot, also from the Beginner Tutorials folder, opens up the robot editor, which is used to edit and create robot files.

The Robot View at the top of the editor displays the structure of the robot. Each step corresponds to an action performed by the robot. Going through the steps in the Robot View the robot loads News Magazine, navigates to the most recent articles and extracts a title and a preview of the stories by using a loop. The robot then finally returns the collected values.

Clicking the second step in the Robot View executes the Load Page action and we see that News Magazine loads in the Browser View below. As we will see later, the Browser View makes it really intuitive to build a robot.

The next tutorial will show you how to build this robot yourself.

5 Management Console:

After creating our type and robot we will add the Development Database from the Database View to our project.

Using our type we will create a database table in the Development Database to store our extracted data into.

Then, once we have automated the process of extraction with the robot, we will upload that robot to the Management Console to schedule execution of the robot. The Management Console is a web-based application for managing the operational aspects of Kapow Katalyst.

The final product will be a scheduled robot which automatically extracts the most recent stories from News Magazine and stores them in a database.

What next?

You are now ready to start building your first robot. Start the Beginner Tutorials by watching the Robot Beginner's Tutorial.