- edited by
Michael_S
Community Blueprints are tried-and-tested examples of automation projects, created by our community members. You can submit your own project to the Blueprints library here.
Issuing release files, superfast
Which industry did you deploy this use case in?
- Other
Which functional area / department within the organization benefitted most from this automation?
- Automation Centre of Excellence
Which SS&C Blue Prism tools did you use?
- SS&C Blue Prism Enterprise
- SS&C Blue Prism Cloud
Describe the problem your automation aimed to solve
When release files get submitted for import into a higher environment, they need to be reviewed by the Release Management team before approval of the submission. This usually involved opening the file and manually traversing all the Processes, Objects, and related pages, ensuring it matches the release notes supplied and SDD.
This object allows automating that process, as it will read the release file from a network location, and provide a flattened table view of the contents in a Collection. This Collection in turn can be saved into an Excel file, or automatically traversed to verify the contents.
Provide a brief, step-by-step outline of how you set up your automation
While managing the Centre of Excellence in my past roles, this used to be a bottleneck in a few bigger organisations.
There wasn't an easy way to solve this due to lack of expertise on the subject.
I knew the XML within the release files is standardised, and as such a good candidate for automation, so I went off to learn more about ways of interacting with XML programmatically.
I built the solution using VB.Net, and after a few trials and errors came up with code that would work every time. I ran this on several different release files, but as I couldn't use data from customer databases, or any production releases, this was done on my own content - as such comes with no warranty whatsoever, and may still have a few kinks here and there (due to lack of sufficient test cases).
What were the main challenges you faced during this project, and how did you overcome them?
The main challenge was to come up with code that would output a view usable not only manually but programmatically as well.
To overcome this I used various AI code analyzers, until I finally got the result I needed.
What was the impact of your project?
Cutting down the release management process from 3 hours per file to 15-30 minutes.
Is there anything else our community should know about your Blueprint?
You can find the Object attached - but it is only an object providing the flattened data from the release file. It does not do any analysis, formatting, or restructuring as such. This is done on purpose to allow for more creative applications.
Happy modding!
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