Blue Prism import object error

[dkate]

Hi Team,
  I am getting an error wile importing a blue prism object (size < 400 KB) . I tried cmd commands as well and increased the timeout to 600 but still got the same error. Any suggestions on what could cause the error:

Blue Prism version: v 6.9.1

Error: An error occurred while attempting to import the release:
Import failed: Execution Timeout Expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.
Operation cancelled by user.
The statement has been terminated.

[david.l.morris]

Try using a Direct Database connection. That is supposed to be faster, and it is what I try to use when doing large imports. But frankly you will eventually just run into this limitation even then. The most reliable way I've found to handle this is just to split up releases into fewer processes and objects. If for some reason your objects are that large, it probably means surface automation is causing it because you have images for it that are being saved in the object. I have suggestions there if that is the issue, but I won't assume for now.

But anyway try a direct db connection first and see if it still happens.

[dkate]

Hi David,
  Thanks for the reply. Can you help with a link or blog that I could refer on how this could be done via a direct database connection. The size is less than 400 KB so I would not think its issue with a large object. This object was part of a release but I was specifically getting the error for this object so I decided to import it as a single object that reduced the size to 360 KB

[david.l.morris]

Okay yeah I wasn't really thinking about the size of the release specifically. I should have thought more about that. 400 KB is pretty small. I think my brain turned 400 KB into 400 MB.

I looked this up on the Support site just now, and one of the articles suggests the same thing I did which is to try direct database connection. I think they suggest this to try to help figure out the issue. Like, if it works through direct database connection but not through the app server, then it may mean some kind of network issue or bandwidth issue or something when going through the app server.

As far as how to do a direct db connection. That is fairly simple. You just create a connection and set the type to SQL Server (SQL Authentication) and use the exact same details that are on the app server for the connection there that uses direct db. This should be secure to do given that the password is encrypted in the connection so no one will be able to use the admin password for anything other than the connection itself.

There's another Support article that indicates an issue sometimes with Schedule importing, but you mentioned trying this with just the object in the release. So, consider that there may be some issue with the object itself. For example, I've seen there be issues where a certain character in the description field of the object can cause it to fail to import. Try making another object larger than 400 KB (probably not hard to do), and verify that can be imported. If it can be, then I would say 95% chance that there is some character used in the object that fails to import.

I think what I'd personally try to do if I couldn't figure out what character may be causing the issue is to use an LLM to try figuring that out. I use GitHub Copilot for these things in VSCode. You can just ask the AI to check the whole XML file for any characters that might cause an import failure. Otherwise, you could could just go to the description field, delete everything in it, retype something in there manually (not copy paste), and then try the import again. Something I've done in the past is to create a copy of the object and delete half of the actions, then try the import. If it fails, you know the issue is somewhere in the remaining actions. Delete half the remaining actions, and try the import, etc. Eventually you'l find where the issue is. It could even be in the global code or on the initialise page.