Flexible Filter input Utility - Collection Manipulation from external file

[AndreKöpplin]

Good Morning everyone,

I'm working to increase to utilization of one of our clients Robots. Unfortunately, one of the requirements are, that the Bot have to handle in the future more Items with different Sender Name or Subjects, which have to filtered from an Report.

In the current BOT I'm using this fix Input Filter in the "Utility - Collection Manipulation":

"[Completed On] <> '' AND [Completed On]='" & AddDays(Today(), -ToNumber([ConfigData.PrevDays])) & "'" & "AND [Sender Name] LIKE '%It is spring%'"

I added this Input Filter value into our configFile:

"[Completed On] <> '' AND [Completed On]='" & AddDays(Today(), -4) & "'" & "AND [Sender Name] LIKE '%It is spring%'"

I started to work with it, but I got errors in Blue Prism, that one ' is miss placed, but I not found any solution.

Are there any ways to use "flexible" input parameters, which can be import from a ConfigFile to filter something in Blue Pirsm?

Thanks in advance for your support.

Best regards
Andre

------------------------------
Andre Köpplin
RPA Project Manager
Europe/Wroclaw
------------------------------

[wleung · Accepted solution]

Hello Andre,

For simple configurations, it may be easier to define and manage those parameters as Environment Variables in Blue Prism and use them for the filters values.

If you have a need for a more generic solution, I would use our "Utility - File Management" VBO's "Get CSV Text As Collection" as an example to create a parser to read standard config files into Blue Prism collections. I did a quick search on our Blue Prism Digital Exchange ( https://digitalexchange.blueprism.com/dx/search ) to see if this capability is already provided in one of our extended VBOs or by something our Partner/Customers may have shared but didn't find anything at this time.

Lastly, one thing I found that helps when I need to build out complex queries is to use a Multi-calc stage. Not more efficient but definitely helps with readability for longer filters/queries.

------------------------------
Wing Ling Leung
Senior Product Consultant
Blue Prism Professional Services
------------------------------