Collection In environment Variable

[JerinJose]

​Collection in environment variable will be a life changing experience in Blueprism World. Environment variable for a whole process can be defined in a single collection. this reduces number of environment variables to be defined

[Daniel_Sanhueza]

Hello Jose!
Could you please describe better? Is this really a solution? The only way that i'm thinking on how to take a Variable in the position 5 of 9 (for example) is by looping the collection of environment variables and making desicions if they exist or not and throw an exception if it not exist... I think that is an unnecesary logic, perhaps Im wrong and Im misunderstanding your Idea, so I'm curious how you're thinking this will work

[JerinJose]

​my point is, a collection in environment variable could replace use of config file. most of the developers are currently following a practice to keep an excel file which is populated with network paths, website urls,etc they basically get this to collection and use that inside process. having a collection available in environment variable can replace the config file.

[MelanieGiuliani]

Hi Jerin,

Thanks so much for submitting your idea! We are moving it into the Under Consideration status while we route the idea through our internal review process. 

We will update you as your idea moves along the lifecycle.

Thank you!
Melanie 

[RubenRaveel]

We're working around this by adding CSV content in the environment variables and parsing it to a collection within the process. Works well, but isn't the best UX of course.

[AmolJangam]

Definitely, It will save the day for prod support team.

Most of the process I had developed had around 10 to 15 variables, Organizations with 100s processes will have 1000 EVs and going through them to required EV is time consuming task.

Having Collection as EV Data type will ease the life of developer.

[stepher]

Hello, All,

I would agree that having Collections natively available as Environmental Variables could be very beneficial. I have asked about it before, but, in thinking about it, I am also not sure how loading the collection would be handled, short of manually. That is not undoable, but it may be cumbersome.

Overall, I have moved away from using saved reference files (whether config, csv, or xlsx) to something very similar to @RubenRaveel. The challenge I was initially addressing had to do with multiple Bots attempting to access the same reference file in or about the same time.  Moving these to an Environmental variable looks to have addressed that.

All that said, I would like to draw your attention to a video that Dave Morris (@david.l.morris) created to discuss a method he has for addressing Environmental Variables.  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MGx6YMJRkA) It is definitely worth considering.

Good luck,

Red