Open workbook of MS Excel VBO not working in the control room

[Tolani.Jaiye-Tikolo]

We are currently experiencing an issue in our production environment,
In Development and Test environment, the open workbook action opens the excel document from the shared location but in Production, once we run the process, it spits out this error

Microsoft Excel cannot access the file '\\XXX_230109.xlsx'.

There are several possible reasons:
• The file name or path does not exist.
• The file is being used by another program.
• The workbook you are trying to save has the same name as a currently open workbook.

Mind you, this works in debug in the production environment.

Please how do I resolve this issue?

[Denis__Dennehy]

Most likely this is an environment issue rather than any problem with the Blue Prism product.  File access errors in a new/different environment is often down to access rights of the robot user to file locations,  so it might be worth ensuring that the robot has read access of the folder the file is in.

[Tolani.Jaiye-Tikolo]

@Denis__Dennehy

So, it's unlikely for the robot user not to be able to access the file.

What do you suggest?

I saw another cmment on delays with opening excel document in another thread. There seems to be a limit that excel will wait before it times out.

I'm not suggesting that my error might be related to this but  do you think I should consider this, judging by the fact the file is in a network share?

[ewilson]

@Tolani.Jaiye-Tikolo

There is a timeout value included in some of the actions. I don't recall if the Open Workbook action was one of them, but it's pretty easy to check. Just open the action and see if there's a Timeout data item defined. If so, you can always try increasing it.

Cheers,

Eric  

[Denis__Dennehy]

My experience is this error message is fairly accurate - Blue Prism either cannot find or cannot access the file in question.
The filename you have given in the error message - '\\XXX_230109.xlsx'.  Is that just an example filename you are giving to obfuscate business data or is that the actual text in the Blue Prism error message?   I would expect only a server name to be after a double backslash.

You mention "it is unlikely the robot user not to be able to access the file" ,  could you confirm what checks you have done?   How is the robot logging into the resource machine?  What privilidges does it have?  A trick I used to do is to start the resourcepc as administrator (just once as a test) - if the robot could suddenly access the file I knew I had an access issue with the file or folder that I had to solve and could discount all other problem solving.