How to deal with persistent pop-up from website in Blue Prism

[MuraliKumar]

We have a web application (ASP.NET) that generates a pop-up every 20 minutes warning user of session timeout. Note that this pop-up is not a separate IE window - instead it is a modal popup within Internet Explorer, and hence does not show up as a separate iexplore.exe process. The user is expected to click on the "Ok" button on the modal pop-up to extend the timeout by another 20 minutes, else all data entered on the website is lost. The website was designed in such a way that even if the user or a RPA bot is entering data in the various input fields on the web page, it is still not recognized by the web server as non-idle work, and hence it still shows the pop-up every 20 minutes regardless. We cannot make a change in the web application to remove or fix this session timeout pop-up. Given this scenario, what is the best way to interact with this persistent 20-minute modal pop-up using Blue Prism? The issue we are facing is that the process that we are automating using Blue Prism requires the bot to key in data for 200 fields on the website. And there is no intermediate Save or server postback designed in this website to trick the website into believing that the bot is active. Hence, every 20 minutes, we get this modal pop-up, no matter what the bot is doing. We are unable to come up with a solution or strategy to deal with such modal pop-ups in IE. Has anyone faced this issue before? Any suggestions on how best to deal with this situation would be very helpful. Thanks a lot

[John__Carter]

If the pop-up doesn't come up for human users, then the answer probably lies in making the process behave more like a human with clicks and keystrokes. But if the pop-up also appears for human users, then I guess you'll need to weave a 'is the pop-up there' check into the process.

[UvarajThangavel]

@Muralik, Are those 200 fields spied as HTML element?  we have faced similar situation (not exactly) where our process takes more than 15 minutes to fill in the workqueue just interacting ONLY with HTML elements (web application) and there is a screensaver lock after 15 minutes because the windows doesnt recognize the (robot)user as active. we tried using one of AA element within that workqueue filling flow which helped us to avoid screensaver lock. Which means that windows could able recognize that (robot) user is still active. I am not sure whether it will solve your problem but you could give a try. 

[MuraliKumar]

Hi, Thanks for your response. The pop-up does appear for human users as well - but they just click on Continue and go ahead with the filling out the web form. For the bot, it becomes more difficult because of the massive number of fields to fill out in the webpage. While the bot is able to detect the pop-up window the first time, it fails to do so within 1 minute when the next time this pop-up comes up. And the pop-up only gives 1 minute window to click Continue before it logs the bot off the website. So if the pop-up cannot be detected within 1 minute, the bot is logged off from the website and all work is lost. We think that because this website has over 200 form fields, the bot get slower and slower as it spies and fills out data in each field, and hence detecting the pop-up next time is also very slow. Also, we do not really have an issue with the screensaver since our screensaver setting is 3 hours. It's the website itself where the default session timeout on the IIS server is 20 minutes - so the website is expecting the human/bot to finish filling out the details within 20 minutes. If the activity goes beyond 20 minutes, it will show the pop-up and expects user/bot to click Continue before resuming the work for another 20 minutes. It is nothing to do with whether the human or bot is ""idle"" on the website. MK

[TobiasArnold]

Hi muralik, can you tell us what triggers the modal dialog? Is it triggered by a javascript timer which calls window.showModalDialog? If so, it seems that this loads a small webpage from the server to prevent the user from session timeout. What you can do is to insert javascript to override the window.showModalDialog with something like this (not tested, jQuery is required! ;-)) window.showModalDialog = function(url) { $.get(url); } Have fun Tobias