Sikuli User Input Boxes

Sikuli has many advantages what automating Digital Finance processes. When building automations, the main objective is to make the user be able to use it without any understanding of the programming behind it. There is a rule in the world of developers, which is that you do not want the user touching the code and design behind an application. The same rule applies when automating processes in accounting and finance. If you want to develop a process that asks for multiple inputs from the user, the best way to handle it is input boxes. Sikuli has easy ways of storing whatever is typed in an input box into a variable.

Here is an example:

In accounting, the majority of the work revolves around journal entries. If we were building a process that would automate some parts of a journal entry, then we would need the user that is kicking off the process to input the entry name.

1. To create an input box in Sikuli, we have to use the input() command.
2. To ask the user a question, we have to put the question inside the parenthesis.
   input(“What is the journal entry name?”) Note: Text always needs to be wrapped around quotes.
   Here is what the Sikuli input box looks like when the code is run.
   
3. Now we need to store the answer into a variable so that whatever is inputted can be used later on in the automation.
   JEname=input(“What is the journal entry name?”)
4. Now the name of the journal entry will be stored in the ‘JEname’ variable. Any reference to the journal entry name can be substituted with the variable.

One great feature of the Sikuli input boxes is that it can hide password input when the user enters a password. To have the password hidden, you have to use “hidden=True”.

For the answer above, we can add this statement.

JEname=input(“What is the journal entry name?”, hidden=True)

Remember to add a comma before putting in this function.

When the user types the name/password, the result will be in asterisks like this:

Input boxes are a great way to get user inputs for names, dates, numbers, colors etc. An example of this is it can be built into a Sikuli application to ask for when to schedule a journal entry or an ERP query. There is a lot of great use cases for this in the industry of Digital Finance. Since the end user is going to be doing this process, you have to think about making the process be as least complicated as it can possibly be.

Another great way to get user responses is by creating dropdown menus, which you can find in our Sikuli section.