Timeout in Microsoft VBOs (Excel, Outlook, Word)

[flavio.lara]

Hello Experts,

When using objects with application modeler we can configure a timeout that raises an Exception if the application stop working.

Is there any way to have the same behavior when working with Microsoft VBOs like Excel, Outlook, and Word?

Many times we have errors when Writing Collections to Excel or Sending a bunch of emails in Outlook. The process moves to "Warning" status and we have to interfere manually.

The idea is to raise an Exception to close the frozen application (excel, outlook) and restart the process flow.

Many thanks!

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Flavio Lara
System Analyst / RPA Developer
Vallourec Tubos do Brasil
America/Belo_Horizonte_Brazil
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[ewilson]

Hi @flavio.lara,

Interesting question. I don't think there's an out-of-the-box solution for this, but here are a couple off-the-cuff ideas. 

One way I can think of to do this, a bit of hack, is to actually have a Digital Worker monitoring Control Room looking for processes that are marked as Warning. Then that digital worker could initiate an action on the specific process. If you have a later version of Blue Prism with Data Gateways, you might be able to capture that information in the data stream as opposed to having to automate the actual UI of Blue Prism Control Room.

Another option, more complex, would be to actually look at the code stages within the specific VBOs you're dealing with. If there are certain actions that always seem to be the source of the problem you might consider whether those code stage can be changed such that the use an additional thread to conduct the action while the main thread loops waiting for conclusion of the processing thread or a timeout. This is a much deeper approach and something that would probably take some time to work through.

Does that make sense?

Cheers,
​

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Eric Wilson
Director, Partner Integrations for Digital Exchange
Blue Prism
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[flavio.lara]

Hi Eric! Thank you for your ideas.

Yes, that makes sense... 

The cons of the first approach, if I got your idea correctly, is We will need an additional license to keep this "Monitor Bot" running. Am I right?
An option could be to create a windows service that gets this "Warning" status directly from BP Database. Then tries to identify and kill the frozen application.
We already have something similar to that, but just to notify about frozen bots and offline runtimes resources (when unexpectedly the Automate.exe dies)

The second one is really complex as you mentioned. It can definitively solve the problem but there is a risk of compromising the VBO stability if not well implemented.
Besides we have to be careful when updating the BP version.

Thank you again for your ideas! I'll think about that.

Best regards!


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Flavio Lara
System Analyst
Vallourec Tubos do Brasil
America/Sao_PauloBrazil
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[ewilson]

Yes, if you went with the first option and automated the UI of the Blue Prism client it would require a license.

Cheers,

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Eric Wilson
Director, Partner Integrations for Digital Exchange
Blue Prism
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