Queue Reports VBO on DX

[Tejaskumar_Darji]

I was looking for Queue Reports VBO on DX but could not locate it.

Though I was able to find it in one of the developer jumpstart here.

Since it is not on DX so thought to raise a query here about the same.

Is it safe to use this VBO or not.

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Thanks & Regards,
Tejaskumar Darji
Sr. RPA Consultant-Automation Developer
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[Neel1]

We are also using Queue report VBO from this option only.

i think few VBO are on developer jumpstart page before DX was introduced(may be).

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Neeraj Kumar
Technical Architect
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[ewilson]

Hi @Tejaskumar_Darji,

As @Neeraj Kumar pointed out, this asset is only available on the portal at the moment. You can find it here. We'll work on getting it moved over to the DX.

Cheers,

​​​

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Eric Wilson
Director, Integrations and Enablement
Blue Prism Digital Exchange
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[david.l.morris]

Hi Eric,

I don't know who maintains that VBO or if it's intended to be left as is, but there are a few issues with it. Off the top of my head, one of the issues is that it cannot correctly run multiple times in the same run as it will keep adding to the same collection thus creating duplicate rows. Basically it doesn't seem to clear out its collection when the action is called subsequent times.

I didn't spend much time looking into it because I like reinventing the wheel I guess. Just wanted to mention it so you could take note of it or let whoever maintains it to consider checking on its functionality at least regarding subsequent calls in the same session.

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Dave Morris
3Ci at Southern Company
Atlanta, GA
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[ewilson]

Hi @Dave Morris,

Thanks for the feedback. I'm not sure who's responsible for it right now. Once we bring it on to the DX​, my team will pick up the support though. 😉

Cheers,

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Eric Wilson
Director, Integrations and Enablement
Blue Prism Digital Exchange
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[Tejaskumar_Darji]

Thank you everyone for your responses.

This VBO will bring better reporting solutions to the users.

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Thanks & Regards,
Tejaskumar Darji
Sr. RPA Consultant-Automation Developer
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[ewilson]

Hi @Dave Morris, @Tejaskumar_Darji,

Apologies for the delay on this. ​We've finally published the Queue Report VBO on the DX, and now we're looking over the design in order to address reported issues.

@Dave Morris - You had reported "...doesn't seem to clear out its collection when the action is called subsequent times." Which action(s) are you referring to? Would it be Create Performance Report (from multiple queues)​ or Create Performance Report (from items) actions? I've taken a quick look through the VBO and it seems there's a single Collection that doesn't have the Reset to Initial Value whenever this page runs option checked.​

@Tejaskumar_Darji - I saw your post yesterday about the issue of embedded Collections throwing an exception​. We'll look into that.

Cheers,​

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Eric Wilson
Director, Integrations and Enablement
Blue Prism Digital Exchange
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[david.l.morris]

@ewilson The action "Get Data From Items". It's been a while since I looked into this, but I'm glancing at what I did previously to address the issue, and what I did was to put a code stage at the beginning of that action that called a new function/sub in the Global Code to clear the DataFromItems DataTable whenever that action begins to run. I'm sure there may be a simpler way to do it, but below is what I added to the Global Code. The first line below was already there and I'm just including it to show where I placed the Sub, though I guess that doesn't matter. Anyway, I call ClearDataFromItems() right when Get Data From Items starts. I'm sure you may implement a fix differently, but I wanted to point how I did it.

This page/action appears to be called from several other pages/actions so I suppose this would affect all of them. In any case, the main thing I found was that it was adding duplicate rows when calling the action multiple times from in the same process within the same session because that DataTable was not being cleared or overwritten each time but instead was being appended to.

Public DataFromItems As DataTable

Public Sub ClearDataFromItems()
	If DataFromItems Is Nothing Then
		'Do nothing
	Else
		'Clear DataFromItems
		DataFromItems = Nothing
	End If
End Sub​

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Dave Morris
3Ci at Southern Company
Atlanta, GA
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[ewilson]

Thanks for the feedback @Dave Morris. I've got one more question for you and @Tejaskumar_Darji. We're been toying with a mechanism to support inclusion of Collection data. I don't recall why exactly the original developer(s) of this VBO didn't implement support for it. What we've done is added logic to take any embedded Collection and convert it to JSON. We then write it to the output Collection as text. Would that be beneficial, or should we stick with the original design of ignoring embedded Collections?

Cheers,​​

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Eric Wilson
Director, Integrations and Enablement
Blue Prism Digital Exchange
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[Tejaskumar_Darji]

Honestly, I felt that Queue Reports VBO is doing so many operations using code stages like excel formulas, excel templates, pivot tables, etc etc. making it a more complex solution just for the reporting. Also, it is a Queue Reporting right so we do not need any data inside the queue, I'm not sure why we are looking inside the data of a queue and why the nested collection is required here.

So instead of going with that VBO, I have seen people prefer "Get Report Data Action from Default WorkQueue VBO itself which will be a more simple, easy, and more efficient solution. (Considering that WQ data is gonna be huge in most cases)

Also, this is the reason why I was checking if we can replicate the same Control Room-"Export Current View as Report" option in some utility itself to get the CSV exports easily. As we already have this option in Control Room so there must be some SQL query or something running in the backend. This will also streamline the format of reports when generated manually OR generated by automation. - Thread Reference 

My thought is to keep it very simple and straightforward and then later we can add more new functions to enrich the Reporting Utility in Blue prism.

These are just my thoughts on this from the design and general requirement perspective. Please share your thoughts as well so that we all can bring a great reporting feature to BP.



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If I was of assistance, please vote for it to be the "Best Answer".

Thanks & Regards,
Tejaskumar Darji
Sr. Consultant-Technical Lead
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