Wait stages not timing out if application crashes

[ChrisHodgson1]

Hi, We have a new point of sale application that is suffering from some teething issues. The application will occasionally crash on launch, requiring a restart. Our application support team are looking into a long term fix, but in the meantime we are hoping to find a workaround to a specific issue with the automations that are occurring due to these crashes. Our processes will launch the application and wait for the check exist stage to pass (checking for the window to exist), so we would expect the stage to: 1: Succeed, and move on. Even though the application has crashed, the window exists, therefore the check exist stage may still recognise that it's launched. 2: Time out. The application element may not exist as expected and therefore except and deal with the exception. This is fine when it launches successfully. However, should the application crash the check exist stage will 'hang' instead. This results in our processes getting warnings and requiring manual intervention to close the application. This is an annoyance during business hours and a significant issue outside of business hours. Has anybody else had a similar issue and overcome it? We are hoping the application launch issues will be resolved internally, but in the meantime we would appreciate any advice on working around it. Thanks, Chris

[david.l.morris]

Hi Chris, I haven't faced that particular issue, but I figured I'd chime in with a suggestion. On one hand, this sounds like something to be reported to BP for a fix, but on the other hand you probably need a solution now. So, as a stop-gap solution could you delay attaching to the app so that BP doesn't hang? If the issue only happens when the application is launched, maybe you could update your code to instead use the Start Process action so that Blue Prism doesn't attempt to attach right away. And then have an (unfortunately) arbitrary wait/sleep of 10 seconds or whatever it takes (during which the app will succeed or fail on its own) and then use a nav stage to attach to the application using window title or whatever. Just an idea to try. Respectfully, Dave

[ChrisHodgson1]

Hi Dave, Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, we've already tried this idea. We've tried adding an extra stage after each launch to look for the windows error reporting pop-up (DWWIN.exe in task manager), excepting if it finds it within 10 seconds. This didn't solve the issue either. We may have to look at using a very long wait time on launch to be sure it has crashed before we look for the error reporting pop-up. Hopefully we'll have a proper fix in our application soon. Thanks for the help. Chris