Job Queue - No Pending?

[rjw.garret.huber]

I just started as a Blue Prism Dev after being a UiPath Dev for the last 3 years.  The company I work for now is just getting started with RPA and I was discussing scheduling and running jobs with my boss today.  I was surprised to find out that if a scheduled job tries to run and there are no resources available then it will not run and not go to a pending state.  In UiPath jobs that were waiting for resources to become available would stay in a pending state.   Is there a setting that we are missing, or is that the way it is designed?

[rjw.garret.huber]

I just got off a call with BP support.  This feature is only available with the Next Gen platform.

[JMCHAPMA · Accepted solution]

It's not very good to be honest. I was expecting the same when I first used the software. 
There are third party companies that offer the orchestration like Catalyst, but obviously it's at an extra expense.
A basic workaround would be to have your own process queue and have an action at the end of each process fire off an external script which calls the next process via the API.

[20MuraliKrishna · Accepted solution]

Hi @rjw.garret.huber , 

Yes, that is by design in Blue Prism. Unlike UiPath, Blue Prism does not place scheduled jobs in a pending state if no resources are available. Instead, if a resource is unavailable when the schedule triggers, the job simply does not run.

You can verify whether a scheduled job was successful or not by reviewing the "Recent Activity" section in Blue Prism. This report will show whether the job ran successfully, failed, due to resource unavailability. Ensuring that adequate resources are available at the scheduled time is crucial when working with Blue Prism.

[Tejaskumar_Darji]

Simply stating, this is how the tool is designed at the moment. Here are some alternatives that can be used in such a scenario:

1) You can set the scheduler of the process that needs to stay in a pending state to trigger every few minutes. This way, as soon as the bot completes the previous process and goes idle, it will trigger your process. You could say that we don’t keep it in a pending state, but you can set it to trigger every X minutes. If the bot is available, it will start running your other process and ignore if bot is busy.

2)Add both processes to a single schedule. If you want to run Process 1 and then Process 2, instead of creating the possibility of a pending session, you can schedule them in sequence. This way, upon completion of Process 1, Process 2 will start immediately, leaving no room for a pending session.