A method for converting processes and objects from Blue Prism 6.6 to lower.

[AustinDuke]

Hi folks,

As some of you might know there was a change in the Blue Prism XML structure during the transition from 6.5 to 6.6 where some of the dimension tags were changed this had the effect that if you were to upgrade to 6.6 and then try to migrate a process or object back down to an earlier version environment that all of the stages in the Studio canvas would be stacked on top of each other.

The reason this occurs is because because in the transition to 6.6 all the dimension data like width and height and  (x,y) positioning went from being denoted in child elements to being denoted with attributes in the xml and when you migrate a process from 6.6 to a lower version that version doesn't understand the new attribute tags and simply uses default values for everything. Here's an example of the change:

6.4 XML

6.6 XML

From the two images above they both share the same stageid so we are looking at the same stage but the 6.4 values clearly do not match up with what we had in 6.6 and this will be true of every single stage in the bprelease. To address this I made a script that reads through a bprelease file  export from 6.6 and rewrites all of the dimension attributes as child elements and thus makes the process or objects look nice and aligned like one might hope. Here is what that stage looks like after the tool is done:

Attached is a zip file and in that zip file is an executable called Prettify. To use the tool you just have to run the EXE and here is what should happen:

1) A pop up message tells you to "Select the Bprelease for conversion"
2) Click okay and then a file dialog box opens
3) Select the bprelease file that you have exported from 6.6
4) A progress bar should show up that details the progress on converting the bprelease
     -This is down in two stages; first process and then objects so you will see two progress bars in total, one after the other.
5) A pop up message box telling you "Choose where you want to save the fixed Bprelease..."
6) Click okay and then a file dialog box opens
7) Where you want to save the new file and what you want to name it
😎 Import that file into your lower version environment

DISCLAIMERS

This tool was made to solve this problem for my team and is not an officially supported tool from Blue Prism.

Because this tool was made for my team it has received limited testing BUT in the cases tested it worked quite well. It is however possible that there is a set of cases out there that cause issues.

The largest case tested was a release with over 400 objects and processes with more than 43,000 stages which had a run time of 87 minutes going off of that I estimate a process time of about 494 stages/minute.

Make sure you keep backups of the original release and please make sure to test the processes and objects after importing them to a lower version environment.

I have used this tool with various Blue Prism versions from 6.7, 6.6 and 6.5, 6.4 and they tested well.

If you happen to run this tool and find an issue or something doesn't work quite right feel free to ask a question here and I will see if I can't help you.

------------------------------
Austin Duke
Senior Innovation Specialist
Blue Prism
------------------------------

[BrentonWestwood]

Austin, this is great and I have a need for this but the EXE is not allowed to be run at my company.   Do you have a PowerShell version of this by chance?   Or can you share the code?   Thanks​

------------------------------
Brenton Westwood
Systems Analyst
Southern Company
------------------------------

[AntonHosang1]

Hi Brenton, we have a tool written as a Form in VBA, so hopefully you can download and use that.
It's is pretty self-explanatory, and pretty fast.

You will have to enable macros to run the Form.
You may need to unblock the file if your PC blocks files after download.

You should use a different filepath for the transformed file.

Let me know about any issues.

------------------------------
Anton Hosang
RPA Developer
Smart Automation Services
Europe/London
------------------------------