Running process on a bot from another bot

[MayankGoyal2]

Hi,
I have to call a process on a certain bot from a different process on a different bot. the aim is to have a central bot that is running a process and calling process on different bots.
Is there something available in blue prism to achieve this, also how will the central bot check if other bot is busy running something and in that case pass request to a different available bot.If all bots are busy, queue the request and as soon as next bot is free, it picks up the request.

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Mayank Goyal
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[MayankGoyal2]

@John Carter ​, @AmiBarrett​  - Kindly suggest if there is a command available with automatec which we can use on CMD to check if a blue prism VM resource PC is online and not busy and if offline, we can bring it online? I tried looking for such command but was not able to find in help documents.

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Mayank Goyal
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[AmiBarrett]

That depends on what you mean by online. Do you mean that Automate.exe is running, or that Windows is up and running? If you mean Automate, you can use the /resourcestatus option with automatec.

You can also (technically) kill two birds with one stone, by using tasklist /s systemName /u domain\user /p password /FI automate.exe  .

Edit: Forgot this bit - 

As for starting a process remotely, the easiest way is to grab PSExec and invoke that. Alternatively, there are powershell options you can use.

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Ami Barrett
Sr Product Consultant
Blue Prism
Plano, TX
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[MayankGoyal2]

@AmiBarrett ​- Thanks a lot for your response, yes by online I mean automate.exe resource PC is up and running so that blue prism process can be executed on it. What i understand is you have suggested to run automatec /resourcestatus for last 1 minute and that will suggest if there is any ongoing session on it in progress to check if machine is busy. Resource status returns back response even if automate.exe resource PC is offline, just tried it.

To check if resource PC is online - you have suggested to use "tasklist /s systemName /u domain\user /p password /FI automate.exe" as there is no native command for the same

To start resource PC if offline, you have suggested to use PSExec and run "Automate.exe /resourcepc /public"

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Mayank Goyal
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[AmiBarrett]

Calling automatec should only tell the instance local to that system to query the db for information on another remote system. I would be more concerned if there was not a response for an offline resource.

To be clear, the tasklist approach is a method to simultaneously verify if automate.exe is up, and if the VM is online. If you only need to verify the latter, you can also just use a ping.

The PSExec command should start Automate.exe, provided the VM is online and has a logged in session.

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Ami Barrett
Sr Product Consultant
Blue Prism
Plano, TX
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[MayankGoyal2]

@AmiBarrett - Thanks a lot for all your inputs, this gives lots of insight how backend things work. Just one last ques, when our VM is on login agent, i l believe automate.exe will be up and running, so we will use login process of login agent to login a machine on required ID / password, once completed then run main process on that machine. Currently this is how we run login and main process from scheduler today, only difference will be now it will run with CMD.
 ​

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Mayank Goyal
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[AmiBarrett]

That sounds correct, yes. Just bear in mind that it's going to shutdown Automate.exe and restart it again under a different session - it will briefly be inaccessible.

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Ami Barrett
Sr Product Consultant
Blue Prism
Plano, TX
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[MayankGoyal2]

@AmiBarrett ​- This is why when running with scheduler as well, we have kept a gap of 2-3 minutes after login process is completed and before we run the main process. We will do the same with CMD as well.

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Mayank Goyal
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[MayankGoyal2]

@AmiBarrett - Just a quick question on same post, it seems 'automatec resourcestatus' command is not available in BP 6.4. Is there alternate command with which we can check the status of resource PC is busy or not on a machine. The intent is to check if there is a process already running on machine resource PC before invoking a process with automatec /run.​

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Mayank Goyal
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[ewilson]

@Mayank Goyal you can query resource PC's directly through their HTTP interface. You can find out more about this interface from the Blue Prism Online Help 

Cheers,

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Eric Wilson
Director, Partner Integrations for Digital Exchange
Blue Prism
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[MayankGoyal2]

@ewilson - Thanks a lot for your response. I went through entire documentation and was able to get good understanding. kindly suggest if environment is on SSO,  ​http://machinename:8181/user%20name%20admin&password%20MyPassword, what value should I provide for user name and password in that case. I have a central machine from which I want to check the status of a resource PC on different machines on environment with - http://machinename:8181/user%20name%20admin&password%20MyPassword&status.  ​

The documentation just refers to localhost with user and password, it has no reference on remote machine with machinename and SSO.

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Mayank Goyal
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