workday-tasks-time-control

This is a modern, customizable, open-source RPA - Robotic Process Automation - solution with Robocorp environment that will help you to "turn on/off work" and to avoid uncontrolled overtime, or in other words will help you to:

keep track of the starting, ending and the total work time during each workday;
automate the checkin-checkout type of actions you need or want to perform daily, to record the start and the end of the workday;
have the current workday status visible, and the actions at hand, as a system tray icon, and be notified when checkout time is approaching or if overtime started.

This is mostly useful when you are usually starting the workday at flexible, irregular hours in the morning, and in turn you need to calculate and remember during the day when you started and when you should end the workday (and close the computer), while you want to make sure you worked the required or expected amount of time. Or you are doing overtime regularly while you are in the home office, just in case. Or when you are using a checkin-checkout type of application (e.g. web URL, excel file, other) for recording the start and the end of the working day, which you want to automate.

Solution concepts

This is a highly customizable and transparent open-source RPA - Robotic Process Automation - solution with Robocorp, Robot Framework and Selenium or Playwright libraries and extended with Python. It was implemented by using three main concepts: levels concept, check in - check out concept and detached concept. Works on Windows and macOS.

1. Levels concept

The solution has currently three levels, where each level is built on and adds more complexity to the previous one. The three levels are time control level, application level and actions level. The time control level is enabled by default, the others are disabled and needs to be enabled if you want to use them. Detailed levels concept explanation can be found in the related document.

2. Check In - Check Out concept

The "Check In" and "Check Out" type of actions will act differently, depending on the level you had enabled and want to use:

time control level will record in a detached vault file the start and the calculated end time of the workday, and will display the workday status as a tray icon.
application level will automatically open an applications with the given input (e.g. a web URL or an excel file) when you start and end the workday, with the main purpose to record the checkin / checkout times or other similar actions.
action level will automate the actions on the applications opened on the previous level (e.g. click a button or do a time record)

3. Detached concept - vault.json file

Detached concept run means that the solution is totally independent of any continuously running process, and the tray icon is just a handy tool that displays the info found in your vault.json file. Running the tasks will read the input from vault.json file and write the new status back in the same file and end the process.

Customization

devdata/env.json file defines the three customization files needed for this solution, and all customization files are isolated within devdata and locales folder:

"VAULT_FILE": the name of your "devdata/vault.json" file mentioned above. This is the main 
file that you need to edit and control in order to customize this solution for your own needs.

"LOCALE": currently two languages are included, "en" for English and "de" for German. The language
files are under "locales" folder and can be customized.

"APP_KEYWORDS": specific "*keywords.robot"" file that is used to launch the applications and
the actions, when enabled on the second and third level.

As an example, this solution includes the following APP_KEYWORDS files. These files are not used on first level, thus can be ignored for now.

url-keywords.robot to be used for opening a web application
xls-keywords.robot to be used for opening or editing an excel file
app-keywords-comp.robot provided as a template that can be customized and provided as a particular custom checkin / checkout solution for a particular company, or for certain internal system or application, case by case.

What is Robot Framework and Robocorp?

Shortly, Robot Framework is a high-level scripting language written in Python, extendable with any standard or custom Python libraries and modules. Compared with other programming languages it has a tabular syntax that is easy to read in native language, and it is accessible to anyone with basic scripting knowledge. Robocorp makes the work with Robot Framework even easier, by managing and automating the whole environment with RCC toolchain.

The Robocorp environment is totally isolated in an user folder (user\AppData\Local\robocorp on Windows or user\.robocorp on macOS) and it does not mix with the existing user environment. This means downloading this project solution, then downloading the environment, exploring, and then executing the given tasks is harmless.

QuickStart

⏬ Download this solution

Download the latest version from under the Releases section and then extract it to any local folder.

🔨 Install Robocorp Rcc toolchain

Execute tools/install rcc.bat on Windows or see how to install rcc toolchain section below for details, including macOS.

🅾️ Run the "Icon" task

Execute run-tasks.bat on Windows or run-tasks.command on macOS and then choose "Icon" task. Optionally check the detailed instructions below about the tasks and the alternative ways to run them.

NOTE. First run: The full environment is not loaded during RCC toolchain setup, since the needed packages are not known by then, but for any project this is done during first task run. For this solution it is recommended that you choose "Icon" task for first run, and then wait until the full environment is downloaded and ready. The notes for robocorp and rcc toolchain below have the details about the environment location, size and download time.

NOTE. For macOS: The files to run tasks on macOS are run-tasks.command and run-tasks.sh and are located under tools directory. Move them under root directory and move run-tasks.bat for Windows under tools directory. Also note that the .command file on macOS need to set chmod +x file before executing, and then for first run choose "Open With -> Terminal" from Finder, due to macOS permisssion restrictions.

If everything was installed correctly, then a system tray red icon will be displayed with the current time on it:

On Windows, you can keep the icon visible in the notification area with Windows Taskbar settings -> Select which icons appear on the taskbar. On macOS, the icon is always visible.

🔃 Take the solution into daily use

After the first run, Quit the icon from the icon menu and then do the following:

make a copy of the devdata/vault.json with any name (e.g. vault-my.json) and take it into use by editing the "VAULT_FILE" entry from devdata/env.json
run again the "Icon" task
run any other task freely, right away for experimentation purposes. Due to detached concept solution, any task run on the first level will just modify your custom vault.json file accordingly. Obviously this vault file can be any time restored with the initial content.

How to install RCC toolchain?

Windows:

Go to project directory folder and double click tools/install rcc.bat. This will download the Robocorp - Rcc toolchain automatically and will set the Path environment variable. If everything was installed correctly, the displayed messages should be "rcc instance identity is:" and "anonymous health tracking is: disabled". Alternatively, just follow the instructions from https://github.com/robocorp/rcc to install it.

macOS:

Install Homebrew from https://brew.sh if you did not install it already previously. (open Terminal app and run brew command to check). Note that this will take up to ten minutes, if also Xcode Command Line Tools are to be installed.
Install Robocorp - Rcc toolchain with the Terminal command:

brew install robocorp/tools/rcc
Run the following commands:

rcc configure identity --do-not-track

rcc configure identity

If everything was installed correctly, the displayed messages should be "rcc instance identity is:" and "anonymous health tracking is: disabled".

The tasks and how to run them

There are five tasks that you can run, and three ways you can run the tasks.

The five tasks as defined within robot.yaml file are:

In - for "Workday Check In"
Out - for "Workday Check Out"
Verify - for "Workday Verify"
Custom - for "Custom Task"
Icon - for displaying the tray icon

The three ways to run the tasks are:

From within project directory folder, with double click on run-tasks.bat on Windows or run-tasks.command on macOS, then choose task name to run.
From Command prompt on Windows or Terminal on macOS, by executing the following command in the project directory folder, where you will replace the Task word with the actual task name as defined above

rcc run -t Task -e devdata/env.json --controller myname (e.g., rcc run -t Icon -e devdata/env.json --controller wdttc20). Controller myname needs to be different after project or libraries upgrade, otherwise there will be access denied on the Robocorp environment.

From the "Icon menu", after executing any of the In, Out or Icon task since any of these tasks will also display the tray icon.

Detailed tasks explanation:

"Check In": to start the workday, calculate, save, and display the end of the workday as an icon text and tooltip. In addition, for second level will open the checkin application. For third level will do the checkin actions.
"Check Out": to end the workday, reset the check in data and the text icon, and display the total worked time statistics. In addition, for second level will open the checkin application. For third level will do the checkout actions.
"Verify": any time during the day, to verify worked, remaining and under or overtimes. In addition, for second level will open the checkin application for verification purposes.
"Custom": for first level will do nothing. For second level will open the custom application and for third level will do the custom actions.
"Icon": to display the tray icon, which is the essence of the time control on the first level. The icon is also displayed during "Check In" and "Check Out" tasks executions and it can be restarted automatically after operating system reboot. Quit the icon and rerun the task any time you edit devdata/env.json to use custom vault or language.
"Break" icon menu is not a task, but it will simply pause the work and will extend the workday by extending the calculated checkout time. To make things easier, you can include the regular lunch break in the standard working time (e.g., use 8h30’ instead of 8h for the STANDARD_WORKING_TIME entry) and then use this menu break for any additional breaks that should normally extend the workday.

'Hidden' tasks:

"Startup": to enable automatic icon restart by the operating system.
"Language": to regenerate the locales after replacing text messages with own custom text.

Notes for Robocorp and Rcc toolchain

Environment is downloaded under an user folder (user\AppData\Local\robocorp on Windows or user\.robocorp on macOS). You can remove this folder to cleanup everything and start again from scratch.
First task run or when the environment needs updating might take up to 5 minutes to run, and the environment size will be around 1.0 GB. If you switch the library to Playwright (take into use url-keywords-pw.robot), first task run might take up to 15 minutes and the size will be around 3.0 GB.
The environment upgrade happens when you edit the version packages in the conda.yaml files, if for some reason you would need newer packages, or when you add new packages to the same file.
You can also clean the environment with the command > rcc configuration cleanup --help (e.g. --all, --dryrun, etc.). See Rcc manual for details:

https://robocorp.com/docs/rcc/overview
Other useful libraries are available for RPA tasks, e.g., AWS, Database, Desktop, Email, Excel, and you can use these to record the working times on second and third level by any other means than a web application or excel file.

https://robocorp.com/docs/libraries/rpa-framework
You can find useful projects examples at: https://github.com/robocorp