Robotic Process Automation
By adhering to the below documented technical best practices, you can create RPA flows that are robust, maintainable, and scalable, resulting in a more efficient and reliable automation solution.
Creating a Workflow
Modularity is key. Break down the flow into smaller, reusable flows/sequences. This promotes reusability, maintainability, and scalability of the RPA solution.
Use variables & data types effectively by defining variables appropriately to store and manipulate data within the flow. Ensure that you use the correct data types and handle data conversions accurately.
Error & Exception Handling
Incorporate error handling mechanisms in your flow. Catch and handle exceptions appropriately to prevent the flow from failing unexpectedly. Log and notify relevant stakeholders about errors or exceptions encountered during the execution.
Identify potential exceptions and handle them using try-catch blocks. This allows the flow to gracefully handle errors and recover from exceptional situations. [Note: Support for Try-Catch block activity is under review and will be delivered soon].
Logging & Notifications
It’s recommended to implement logging to capture important events, errors and/or warnings that occur during the execution. This helps in troubleshooting and monitoring the flow’s behavior. You may use activities to write any unexpected events to a file.
Set up notifications within the workflow to inform relevant individuals or teams when an exception occurs. This ensures timely awareness and enables prompt action to resolve issues. You may use the Email activities to notify end-users/stakeholders in case any unexpected exception/error occurs.
Access & Version Control
Make use of the RPA security roles to protect the business process data and ensure that access to the flow is controlled and granted only to authorized individuals.
Follow version control and change management practices to track and manage changes made to the flow. This would help in maintaining a clear history of modifications and help in collaboration among developers.
Unattended Troubleshooting
When a job is triggered but nothing is visible in Task Monitoring menu:
- Try refreshing the task monitoring view after a few seconds, jobs will not show up in this menu until the Agent has received them and the job moves into the ‘in progress’ status.
- If the job is still not present after a refresh or two, try the following steps:
- Verify RDP configuration is enabled and setup properly.
When a robot configured in Mastermind is unable to login:
- Ensure that interactive logon messages are disabled for the unattended RPA device.