Pre- & post- execution injection

[Walter.Koller]

It should be possible to define processes that are automatically executed whenever a process / VBO is executed. This allows central management of verifications (eg environment, infrastructure, ...), preparation (setting user context, clean-up caches, creating config/files, ..).
This should be possible to define per runtime resource.

[robert.nicklin]

Hi @Walter.Koller,

Thanks for taking the time to raise an idea.

Can I ask why this outcome cannot be achieved by creating a separate subprocess/object that is referenced at the end of the specific process/VBO that you'd like it executed after?

Or, alternatively, have the process/object that you want to trigger the running of a separate process add an item to a work queue that is scanned by another runtime resource that is responsible for just running maintenance tasks described in queue items?

I'm going to mark this idea as Needs More Info awaiting your feedback.

Regards,

Rob

[Walter.Koller]

Hello @robert.nicklin 

The idea came up when having a business process in production and some additional logic (mostly technical) should be applied to check/config/verify the workplace settings.

This could of course also be achieved when just starting this process manually or changing the schedule to also include this process.

In addition to the point above I also took our set-up into consideration. We have four separate teams working with Blue Prism for different business units. I, as the responsible person for BP infrastructure do have limited influence to what devs do or don't within those teams. Quality assurance is up to each team. 

If I want to have some processes run out of technical reasons I have to reach out to each team to have this process implemented and run at the time and at the workplaces I need them to run. That's needs more communication, effort to implement and eventually check afterwards, compared to add a mandatory process by myself and being in full control. We also have a few individual power users who use Blue Prism every now and then and probably may forgot about my request to run a process until they use BP again.

Such technical reasoned process may be:

• creating inventory of installed SW, current configuration, ...
• generating own logs with additional information not available in session logs
• preemptive correcting issues after recent SW deployments/updates, eg handling/disabling welcome screens because the updated SW wants to inform the robot about recent changes and news
•  applying mandatory checks/verification that cannot be avoided/forgotten by users to run, eg related to IT security, administration, ...
• being able to influence workflow execution in emergencies, eg stopping processes in a schedule before it even started because there is an incident and an emergency downtime. Not critical but topic for our current upgrade to 7.3.2 is to have all schedules disabled until we could verify the upgrade was successful. Currently we have to un-/retire schedules manually. 

Although most of those points can be implemented differently they all come with some flaws in our infrastructure (eg runtime resources are in responsibility of each of those teams so local scripts may or may not be executed/altered/...)

Another way of seeing these mandatory processes execution would be as being some type of template to ease and simplify business process chains by extracting non-business related task into those technical processes. Our devs are business oriented with necessary technical background and have other priorities and understanding of pure technical tasks.

As mentioned most of those points can be achieved in one way or the other but might be much more convenient if such a feature exists. To be fair, this come with some risks that should be considered, like who is allowed to create such mandatory processes, where do they run, how are they logged/presented (eg in 6.x schedules were a bit obfuscated what schedules is currently running where and what step they are processing), possible abuse, negative impact on regular process executions....

Kind regards

[Walter.Koller]

I forgot to mention the usage of mandatory post-processing processes, such as cleanup of temp folders, caches, our custom logging, ...

[robert.nicklin]

Hi @Walter.Koller,

Thank you for the reply and additional information.

This is quite an interesting idea, in that I imagine there are lots of customers out there today doing this, but I've never heard an explicit request like this to try and automate/streamline a process which I imagine most infrastructure teams are considering "BAU" when working with Blue Prism Enterprise at scale.

Thinking out loud, the amount of flexibility we have in the Blue Prism Enterprise scheduler is limited in terms of triggering child processes that would run subsequent to the execution of a certain process or business object, but our Next Gen scheduling technologies are more flexible. We're planning to allow BPE users to access these capabilities through our "Powered by Next Gen" orchestration offering, which comes with the benefits of new capabilities like additional trigger types, i.e. the ability to trigger an automation flow (the Next Gen equivalent of a schedule) based on the presence of items in a work queue with certain tags. The ability to run a specific process after another process/object has ran on the same resource sounds like it could potentially be a new type of trigger, though I have to admit that based on currently levels of feedback it may be viewed as a little niche.

I'll raise this idea with the PM responsible for these automation flow triggers, as I think the idea is interesting and could be considered alongside other "custom" types of triggers, but for transparency I would say that a feature that delivers this outcome isn't going to appear on the roadmap for the next 12 months or so at least.

I'll update the status of this idea to Under Consideration, given that the recent comments may cause this idea to "pop up" for various other community users who may read the discussion and want to give it an upvote and we can then see how many others may find this useful.

Regards,

Rob