Handling crash pop-ups

[Walter.Koller]

We have the issue of randomly crashing business applications, sometimes Excel and whatever can crash, will crash at some point I guess.
When one of the application crashes, a pop-up window appears, informing the user that the application just crash and to press OK to continue (which is actually a shutdown of the application). 
We try to handle the situation but having huge difficulties. 

Normally we wait for an UI element to appear and then react if this happens or mitigate if it doesnt appear. With those crash pop-ups, the UI element is identified by Blue Prism but since the application lost focus and no further interaction is possible, Blue Prism is stuck in a navigation stage.

Time-outs doesnt seem to work as Blue Prism waits for hours that UI is responding although the pop-up doesnt allows it.
However, time-outs are also not the preferred solution as the problem is just moved from everlasting 'running' to stalled 'warning' state.

We also cannot try to identify the pop-up as it can appear between each navigation stage randomly.

Any ideas are much appreciated.

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Walter Koller
Solution Manager
Erste Group IT International GmbH
Europe/Vienna
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[joakimeklund]

The pop up you're refering to is "application is not responding", right?
Have you tried to monitor the memory usage of the application(s) on the machine? This can be done between cases and using the action "Read Process Working Set" in "Utility - Environment". Given that it reaches a certain memory consumption level, just restart the application.

/Joakim

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Joakim Eklund
Senior RPA Developer
Swedbank AB
Europe/Stockholm
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[AmandeepMalhotr]

The solution that we use to solve this issue is to kill the process responsible for showing the popup, which is usually "WerFault.exe". You can write a bat file that which runs in regular intervals to kill this process. Once the process is killed, BP can resume its execution. The interval can be decided according to how frequently this popup shows up.

A better solution is always welcome. 🙂

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Amandeep Malhotra
Graduate Analyst
Barclays Technology Centre India
Europe/London
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[acilinska]

We have similar with the bat file, but a different approach. Program (bat file) is started at the start of the BP process and is running in background, whenever the pop up with specific window name shows up, it is automatically killed.

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A
Robotics Senior Developer

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[Anonymous]

there is a possibility of posting the code for such a bat file?

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Cohen
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[seeannloh]

Hi Annija,

Can you please share how did you start your BAT file after BP process started and is running in background? Are they under the same session?

Thanks

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SeeAnn Loh
Senior Programmer
Jabil
Asia/Kuala_Lumpur
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[BrentonWestwood]

A developer on my team created a Process that can be run at the same time as the Main process because the object it calls has a Run Mode = Background.   This process calls an object that looks for random pop up windows that may display using the Utility - General VBO's 'Window Exists' action.   If the window is found, the object will attach to it and attempt to close the window.    This process also accepts a Time data item named 'Stop Time Override' to set a time when the process should stop running.    So, this may be another option besides the .bat file option.

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Brenton Westwood
Systems Analyst
Southern Company
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[acilinska]

The .bat file can be ran just with Utillity- Environment  - "Start process" action.

But since my comment here has been a while and we migrated to cloud virtual machines were windows defender was not allowing to run this bat file. So now we are using "second thread", which is actually a object with visual basic code that starts this "pop up closing" but as a second thread (first thread is BP code running). 

The problem with running process in background mode is the loss of licence as you are using 2 licences, the foreground one and the background one. 

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Annie
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