Hello,
I need some help with designing a process - I'm the lone Blue Prism developer on my team and I'm unable to open a service ticket because I'm not getting an error message for this issue.
I need to grab five particular elements from a webpage. When I run the following page below in Process Studio, all five elements can be found and recorded in Data Items:
Each Read property grabs an individual web element; the Wait Stages at the moment are 5 seconds, but I have also experimented with wait times up to 60 seconds.
However, when I run the entire process in Process Studio or the Control Room, it moves too fast and all the Data Items are blank. This does not create an error, the process just continues running.
I tested with a retry loop, with just a couple of the Data Items to see if I could get it to pull at least one web element when the entire process is run:
If I run just this page, the Data Items are retrieved, but again, when I run the entire process they aren't. When I run the entire process, the RetryCount and RetryLimit remain unchanged. Here's the code for those below in case I'm missing the obvious:
I'm stuck on how to get the retry loop to actually execute - is it an error on my part or do I need to figure out another way to "induce an error"?
Do you have any suggestions for how else I can get the process to slow down?
I need some help with designing a process - I'm the lone Blue Prism developer on my team and I'm unable to open a service ticket because I'm not getting an error message for this issue.
I need to grab five particular elements from a webpage. When I run the following page below in Process Studio, all five elements can be found and recorded in Data Items:
Each Read property grabs an individual web element; the Wait Stages at the moment are 5 seconds, but I have also experimented with wait times up to 60 seconds.
However, when I run the entire process in Process Studio or the Control Room, it moves too fast and all the Data Items are blank. This does not create an error, the process just continues running.
I tested with a retry loop, with just a couple of the Data Items to see if I could get it to pull at least one web element when the entire process is run:
If I run just this page, the Data Items are retrieved, but again, when I run the entire process they aren't. When I run the entire process, the RetryCount and RetryLimit remain unchanged. Here's the code for those below in case I'm missing the obvious:
I'm stuck on how to get the retry loop to actually execute - is it an error on my part or do I need to figure out another way to "induce an error"?
Do you have any suggestions for how else I can get the process to slow down?
1 BEST ANSWER
Helpful Answers
Hi Gracie,
Sorry I confused you there with that "Get Inventory File Existence" screenshot, I meant there how to keep the "Do not log parameters' option unchecked.
I will break my insights in two parts. First one, how you can throw this exception is by putting a wait stage and using the UIA element with the action "Check UI Automation Attribute" where you can give the appropriate attribute name which shows the value in your app modeller and check it to be not null as shown below:
However see if it works, because from the log screenshot I suspect you are getting some whitespace or a hidden character there instead of null that is the reason why your workflow is not even going to retry state. Check how it works, it can confirm my suspicion there.
Next is what ideally we do as a best practice is not include all the read stages in one action itself. I would suggest you to try and have individual action pages with one read stage each and get the value out as an output parameter onto you process studio. Then, after each action call you can use the 'Sleep' action under 'Utility - General' where you can provide a delay of let say 2 sec or 1 sec as shown below:
So your workflow should be like:
Action 1 (Read Value 1) -> Sleep -> Action 2 (Read Value 2) -> Sleep and so on...
Sorry I confused you there with that "Get Inventory File Existence" screenshot, I meant there how to keep the "Do not log parameters' option unchecked.
I will break my insights in two parts. First one, how you can throw this exception is by putting a wait stage and using the UIA element with the action "Check UI Automation Attribute" where you can give the appropriate attribute name which shows the value in your app modeller and check it to be not null as shown below:
However see if it works, because from the log screenshot I suspect you are getting some whitespace or a hidden character there instead of null that is the reason why your workflow is not even going to retry state. Check how it works, it can confirm my suspicion there.
Next is what ideally we do as a best practice is not include all the read stages in one action itself. I would suggest you to try and have individual action pages with one read stage each and get the value out as an output parameter onto you process studio. Then, after each action call you can use the 'Sleep' action under 'Utility - General' where you can provide a delay of let say 2 sec or 1 sec as shown below:
So your workflow should be like:
Action 1 (Read Value 1) -> Sleep -> Action 2 (Read Value 2) -> Sleep and so on...
Hi Gracie,
I might ask you a couple of pointers to check from your end to understand the issue better.
Firstly, can you enable the logging for all the stages along with parameter logging in the page stage by unchecking the "Dont log parameters on this stage" option which you are using the process studio to call this action. Check if additional spaces are coming or not.
Also, I would suggest to use a sleep stage instead in you process
Secondly, may I know which spying mode are you using to get these read values altogether. If it were AA mode, there is a wait condition check which you can put called as "Check AA Attribute" which can check some value existence directly in a wait stage and throw a timeout if not found.
If you are using any specific spying mode let me know on that too. I will check from my end.
I might ask you a couple of pointers to check from your end to understand the issue better.
Firstly, can you enable the logging for all the stages along with parameter logging in the page stage by unchecking the "Dont log parameters on this stage" option which you are using the process studio to call this action. Check if additional spaces are coming or not.
Also, I would suggest to use a sleep stage instead in you process
Secondly, may I know which spying mode are you using to get these read values altogether. If it were AA mode, there is a wait condition check which you can put called as "Check AA Attribute" which can check some value existence directly in a wait stage and throw a timeout if not found.
If you are using any specific spying mode let me know on that too. I will check from my end.
Hi Devneet,
I enabled all logging and "Don't log parameters on this stage" is unchecked for every action. I ran the process and see that my empty string check comes back as True, even though the Data Item is empty:
I'm a little confused about your "Get Inventory File Existence". I'm pulling the data from a web browser, so for this step should I enter "Chrome" and check for the existence of the web browser? I think I might kinda be doing this already through the "Attach" action, but if you can clarify then I will give it a try.
When you say use a sleep stage, do you mean having a Wait Stage without any kind of check? Like this:
To answer your second question, I am spying the elements in UI Automation Navigator. I'm looking at how to do AA mode and will give that a try too.
Thank you!
I enabled all logging and "Don't log parameters on this stage" is unchecked for every action. I ran the process and see that my empty string check comes back as True, even though the Data Item is empty:
I'm a little confused about your "Get Inventory File Existence". I'm pulling the data from a web browser, so for this step should I enter "Chrome" and check for the existence of the web browser? I think I might kinda be doing this already through the "Attach" action, but if you can clarify then I will give it a try.
When you say use a sleep stage, do you mean having a Wait Stage without any kind of check? Like this:
To answer your second question, I am spying the elements in UI Automation Navigator. I'm looking at how to do AA mode and will give that a try too.
Thank you!
Hi Gracie,
Sorry I confused you there with that "Get Inventory File Existence" screenshot, I meant there how to keep the "Do not log parameters' option unchecked.
I will break my insights in two parts. First one, how you can throw this exception is by putting a wait stage and using the UIA element with the action "Check UI Automation Attribute" where you can give the appropriate attribute name which shows the value in your app modeller and check it to be not null as shown below:
However see if it works, because from the log screenshot I suspect you are getting some whitespace or a hidden character there instead of null that is the reason why your workflow is not even going to retry state. Check how it works, it can confirm my suspicion there.
Next is what ideally we do as a best practice is not include all the read stages in one action itself. I would suggest you to try and have individual action pages with one read stage each and get the value out as an output parameter onto you process studio. Then, after each action call you can use the 'Sleep' action under 'Utility - General' where you can provide a delay of let say 2 sec or 1 sec as shown below:
So your workflow should be like:
Action 1 (Read Value 1) -> Sleep -> Action 2 (Read Value 2) -> Sleep and so on...
Sorry I confused you there with that "Get Inventory File Existence" screenshot, I meant there how to keep the "Do not log parameters' option unchecked.
I will break my insights in two parts. First one, how you can throw this exception is by putting a wait stage and using the UIA element with the action "Check UI Automation Attribute" where you can give the appropriate attribute name which shows the value in your app modeller and check it to be not null as shown below:
However see if it works, because from the log screenshot I suspect you are getting some whitespace or a hidden character there instead of null that is the reason why your workflow is not even going to retry state. Check how it works, it can confirm my suspicion there.
Next is what ideally we do as a best practice is not include all the read stages in one action itself. I would suggest you to try and have individual action pages with one read stage each and get the value out as an output parameter onto you process studio. Then, after each action call you can use the 'Sleep' action under 'Utility - General' where you can provide a delay of let say 2 sec or 1 sec as shown below:
So your workflow should be like:
Action 1 (Read Value 1) -> Sleep -> Action 2 (Read Value 2) -> Sleep and so on...
Hi Devneet,
I used the method to check UI automation attribute as you suggested, and it threw the exception that the order text could not be retrieved (when the action page is run and when the entire process is run).
I don’t know if it’s helpful information, but some of the web elements I’m scraping are UIA Control Type Text (like Server Name) and others are UIA Control Type Edit (like Port). The element type for all of them is Edit Box(UIA). They all have the Data Type Text. This is how they appear in the browser:
I remember using a Trim() function in the consolidation exercise for the foundation training, would you recommend I try that here if the problem is whitespace?
Thank you for the advice about breaking up the read stages into individual action pages! At the moment, I’m scraping 5 web elements from one link on a table, but once I have this part working, I have 25 more tables to pull this same information from. I wonder if you have a suggestion for how to condense it or if I’m going to have to create 100+ action pages for this process 😊.
Thank you!
