topic When to attach in Product Forum

When to attach

JakobSørensen — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 07:16:00 GMT

The team I recently joined has a best practice of having 'Attach' as a seperate action on each object and then call that action first, before any other action on the object is used. So in a simple process, it would look like this:

However, in a process that uses a lot of different objects, that also means a lot of 'Attach' stages. So my question is whether this is the correct time to call attach, or if you should it somewhere else. For instance:

At the beginning of each action
In the initialize action (if this is possible)
...somewhere else?

How do you guys do it?

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Jakob Sørensen
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RE: When to attach

jebarson — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 13:50:00 GMT

It's better to use attach page in beginning of each actions next to start stage. So it will reduce the use of calling them separately in process each time.

What's the application you are automating ? Is it something like mainframe or Citrix.

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Jane Jebarson Senior Automation Engineer
Engineer
Allianz
Europe/London
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RE: When to attach

JakobSørensen — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 14:10:00 GMT

It's a lot of different systems - but most of them are web based. To keep the objects small, we make an object for each logic part of the website (e.g. the navigation bar). But this also means that each object has to be attached. I would find it more logical if each action started with an Check if already attached? > No? > Attach. So that the 'Attach' part wasn't visible at process level.

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Jakob Sørensen
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RE: When to attach

VedSengupta — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 03:55:00 GMT

Hello Jakob,
I believe your take on this is correct.
And that is why "Is connected" condition is there.

If you are calling attach before every action it will make the code huge and it will increase your DEV and Testing efforts.

And I think it is a recommended best practice to check for connection before attaching.
Also if there are many objects and you are automating WEB then synchronizing of detach and attach would be a challenge,

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Best Regards,
Ved Sengupta
RPA Developer
Deloitte India (Offices of the US)
Bangalore | INDIA
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RE: When to attach

diane.sanzone — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 12:24:00 GMT

Hi Jakob,

Might I suggest a hybrid approach? Build the "check attached" piece at the top of your attach page in each object. That way, no matter where it is called from (process or object action page), the check completes first. This will hopefully reduce issues with adopting a new style of development regarding attaching.

One other note - someone once suggested to me that if you're going to call an object page from a process, you need to publish it (obviously), but then you should avoid calling that page from within the object itself. If you're going to call an object page from another page in that object, you should not publish it. If you really want to prevent people from using the Attaches all over your process pages, you could also not publish the page. This way a developer could infer that the attach was built into the object layer and not necessary from the process layer.

I hope this helps, and good luck with the new team!

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Diane Sanzone
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RE: When to attach

JakobSørensen — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 14:07:00 GMT

What I was thinking about doing, was having an attach action (as you mentioned) which first checks and then attaches if necessary, like this:

The only downside of this is that you have to remember to call in the beginning of every action. Which is why I wondered if you could get it to run automatically, by putting it in the initialize action.

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Jakob Sørensen
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RE: When to attach

VedSengupta — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 14:12:00 GMT

Hello Jakob,
If you are having this as initialize action later point of time in code achieving attach would be complex in other places if required.

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Best Regards,
Ved Sengupta
RPA Developer
Deloitte India (Offices of the US)
Bangalore | INDIA
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RE: When to attach

david.l.morris — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 17:52:00 GMT

It's definitely the best way to go to have an Attach subpage reference inside of each action at the beginning of the action. Every single one of our actions starts with a subpage reference like that. In the subpage, it's the standard Attach page that checks to see if it's already connected or not, and if it's not then it connects/attaches.

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Dave Morris
Cano Ai
Atlanta, GA
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RE: When to attach

david.l.morris — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 17:57:00 GMT

That would be an infinite loop if it could not attach because the recover would always catch the attach failure and it would never end.

I think it'd be nice if Blue Prism implemented a way to configure attach to be automatically run in an object. That does seem like a cool idea, but as with most flow-related activities in Blue Prism, it tends to be designed such that we need to specifically an purposefully do something. It causes Blue Prism processes and objects to be filled with tons of stages, but the standard approach works pretty well.

I think it's important for Blue Prism developers to be used to dropping in an Attach subpage reference at the beginning of every action, and a code review checklist can help make sure it gets done before deployment.

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Dave Morris
Cano Ai
Atlanta, GA
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RE: When to attach

VedSengupta — Sat, 18 Sep 2021 05:35:00 GMT

Hello Dave,
I think this sub page reference idea is already a popular option among us developers.
But in that case also we have to call the sub page at the start of every action and in case if we miss it then there's a chance of failure.

Code review checklist helps a lot here having attach before every action as one of the high priority check point.

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Best Regards,
Ved Sengupta
RPA Developer
Deloitte India (Offices of the US)
Bangalore | INDIA
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RE: When to attach

JakobSørensen — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 06:28:00 GMT

It might be worth mentioning that I have limited the "Retry" stage to 3 retries. After that it will throw the exception outside the block - so no infinite loops 🙂

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Jakob Sørensen
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RE: When to attach

david.l.morris — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 14:01:00 GMT

Ah, makes sense. I do not use that feature because it doesn't work correctly in most versions of Blue Prism. It might only work wrong from the Process layer, but in some circumstance, it causes an immediate session termination. But I think (and as you've shown) it works as intended from the Object layer.

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Dave Morris
Cano Ai
Atlanta, GA
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RE: When to attach

NewStudent — Mon, 17 Jan 2022 11:52:00 GMT

Hi All,

what would happen If we don't 'publish' attach page in the objects ? Is it still going to work when we run the process from Control room ?

Thanks

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New Student
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RE: When to attach

devneetmohanty07 — Mon, 17 Jan 2022 14:37:00 GMT

Hi,

If you don't publish an action then that won't be visible itself from the Process Studio, which means you can use that specific action using the Action stage in your process studio.

However, with that being said many times in our solution we do not want to expose all the actions to the process studio, in a way you can say that we want this actions to be private. In this case if we call this Attach action from any other published action in the same business object using a Page stage in the Object Studio then ideally even if we do not publish the Attach action still it will be triggered whenever we call the published action from the Process studio as in the action the 'Attach' action is being called internally via a page reference.

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Hope it helps you and if it resolves you query please mark it as the best answer so that others having the same problem can track the answer easily

Regards,
Devneet Mohanty
Intelligent Process Automation Consultant
Blue Prism 7x Certified Professional
Website: https://devneet.github.io/
Email: devneetmohanty07@gmail.com

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RE: When to attach

david.l.morris — Mon, 17 Jan 2022 23:27:00 GMT

Publishing only affects anything in Control Room when we're talking about publishing a Process. Publishing or not publishing an Object's action is totally different since you can never see an Object listed in Control Room. As Devneet says, the reason for publishing an action is so that it can be directly called by a Process or another Object.

If your Process works to use an action in DEBUG mode (with Process Studio open), then it will work the same from Control Room. The only real difference there is with the speed of execution, so sometimes you'll encounter issues because it's running much faster, but that's a different topic entirely.

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Dave Morris
Cano Ai
Atlanta, GA
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