BP Integration with Git and Bitbucket

[vinodchinthakin]

Hi All,

Can we integrate Blue Prism 6.9 with Version Controlled Systems like Git and Bitbucket?
I know my data like Processes, credentials etc.. will be saving in LocalDB. But I want to save in Git or Bitbucket (It is Client Requirement)
Can we do that? If so, How?


Thanks in advance.

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Vinod
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[JerinJose]

Hi Vinod,

 There is no out of the box integration possibility with external version control tools for BP. Release management and version control is managed by blueprism by keeping all the versions of the process in the backend DB. You can always compare different versions in Studio, View and export older version. 

best thing you can do is to keep the xml of process and objects in Git and later import it to BP (trust me its not worth the effort. Lets wait for BP team to come with Git integration they have already accepted the idea already through idea portal
🙂


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Jerin Jose
RPA Product SME
EY
Asia/Kolkata
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[AndreyKudinov · Accepted solution]

Problem is that XML doesnt play well with VCS - in most cases you can't diff/patch/merge anyway, because there are many ids and attributes that just get broken if you try.
Blueprism itself is good enough to keep version history, so I agree that it is not worth it, but you can keep your bprelease files or individual processes/VBO xml files in git if you really want to.

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Andrey Kudinov
Project Manager
MobileTelesystems PJSC
Europe/Moscow
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[vinodchinthakin]

Thanks Jerin and Andrey for Valuable Info.

"but you can keep your bprelease files or individual processes/VBO xml files in git if you really want to."

Do we need to add processes/VBO in git
1. manually or
2. automate the Git or
3. any code or VBO exists for that operation


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Vinod Kumar
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[AndreyKudinov]

In our case, we are required to store it in svn, because all IT systems do, so our process is:
1) Export bprelease from Testing environment
2) Commit it to svn
3) Create a change request to import it on prod with a link to svn.
4) Person responsible for prod checks out from svn and imports to prod.

So it is just used as storage, because changing policy just for our case would be more work that just doing this.

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Andrey Kudinov
Project Manager
MobileTelesystems PJSC
Europe/Moscow
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[vinodchinthakin]

Hi,

As per previous information I can understand we cannot integrate BP with GIT. 
But when  I gone through a document  Auto-Deployment  BP-GIT using Jenkins, I was able to understand we can do it, but I need a clear explanation.

Please check the attached document and let me know your views.

Thanks in advance

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Vinod Kumar
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[KevinMiller]

Hello,
One of the most useful features of version control systems like Git is that multiple developers can work on the same project at the same time. Each developer has their own copy of the project to edit and test, then the developer merges their changes into the master copy. The basic unit in Git is a text line, which is why XML fails in Git (XML doesn't care about line breaks) as noted by several others in this discussion.

Is there any way for multiple developers to work on the same process at the same time?

Kevin

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Kevin Miller
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[ewilson]

Hi @KevinMiller,

It's possible, but very tricky. You would essentially have developers working on different pages within a process or actions within a VBO. They each create a copy of the base process/VBO and then create their own specific pages/actions. After that, you would have to merge (i.e. copy&paste) those individual pages/actions back into the base copy of the process/VBO.

Cheers,
​

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

I'd say it depends. Some VBOs have relatively independant actions - you can split them in individual files per action page that you can copy and paste into your own. Others like Excel VBO need some kind of core VBO that everything else depends on. 

It would be nice to have some kind of build system that can combine actions you need into a single object automatically, then we could have a git repo of actions. 
I was thinking about this idea a while ago, but never got to try to implement it.

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Andrey Kudinov
Project Manager
MobileTelesystems PJSC
Europe/Moscow
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[KevinMiller]

Thanks Eric. I believe you are correct - it's technically possible using a lot of manual interaction and existing tools like an XML diff, but very complicated for the benefit.

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Kevin Miller
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