Hello, I am building an assisting robot which requires the human and the robot works together (robot is waiting for human to click any button, and if the button is clicked robot do this, and after another field is filled robot do that etc).
But it turns out that human doesn’t really get what the robot is doing now (is it waiting for me, or processing or what). Is there any way to easily notify human what the robot is doing now (what I image is like small overlaying wording right top the screen above all apps, writing like: “Hey, the robot is active and is waiting for you to push the start button”).
Currently, is there any way to do this so that robot and human could communicate more fluently, or should I move this to the Idea category?
And, if there’s no way to do this by now by UiPath, is there any workaround like using other (preferable free) apps or so?
Hello @ddpadil, thank you for your continuous support.
So there is no way to this now just with UiPath.
Working on a user assisting automation now, and there are some moments user forgot whether the pop up showed or not and wonder what the robot is doing now (robot is waiting for user action or is doing a process). Thank you anyway for the reply, working on the workaround now!
Looks like this can be accomplished by Code activity where you can invoke a windows form and show (label) what’s the robot is doing at each step and close after specific time.Is this what you need? I think call out does the same(don’t remember)
Hello @vvaidya, it does sound the same as Callout. Is it what you mean?
If so, no I was looking for a dialog where user doesn’t have to click “ok” (since it adds the user activity and it disappear after ok is clicked). I was looking a bit like desktop screen overlay (where the text can be updated lively), and user doesn’t really need to click it or anything just knowing what the robot is doing/waiting. But it seems not here now, so using Callout for now
So this is my idea, to display the form on the bottom right corner of the screen and display all the steps to the user. User does not have to click anything to close this, it will close automatically. Works fine.
Hello @vvaidya, thank you for your time!
It looks like perfect workaround by now!
I do not know VB.net at all, could you kindly guide me what to enter in Invoke Code?
This is a rudimentary sample of how it works. We have a scope of making it a lot better (make the screen size less, text size bigger etc) and i did not contemplate on the pros on cons of it, one of it being the robot cannot see that part of screen. Hope it helps.
That was… awesome!
Exactly what I was looking for, though we have to obtain it by VB.
Tried to change the position, text, color, transparency even removed the title bar so far almost perfect.
No, I haven’t thought about the pros and contras too.
Moved the solution here.
But if you could help me a bit further @vvaidya, I notice that it keeps blinking when updating status on the fly and then I see that each time it creates a new form. But since I have transparency on, I can see there is only one form every time (that’s why it is just one form exactly). But is it possible to refrain it from “blinking”?
Sorry for the continuous question.
Again thank you.
Thank you @vvaidya for your continuous support! It really helped!
(Sorry for the late response, was out of the country for the year-end)
I am implementing it now and I don’t know why sometimes it hangs on certain flow but I guess I have to check my flow itself, so far the notification just exactly like I needed. Thank you so much!
@badita Mihai, this is the one we were discussing. Can we make this part of an activity which allows the developer to show progress messages for Attended bots so that the user gets constant feedback without interrupting the sequence (which is what MessageBox does).
Yes, giving the control to the developer will make it more easier to implement. I am thinking more like a bootstrap alert, which controls what background and level of information is displayed. This will ensure we can change the alert to “Warning” when starting a process and change to “success” once it completes. Or use a generic “info” for other kind of statuses.
How come this throws an exception at the end? It runs all the code but throws an exception.
Yes this is not the error from running your code, because i’ve implemented into my own robot. But the error is the exact same just with another job name
Thanks for the reply, I’ll try and get your code to work as the status activity isn’t really useful. It shows and then disappears very fast, no option to make it permanent to show text while robot is running, and that is what I need.
UPDATE: Change comments, lblAlerts and form to ‘in’ under arguments instead of the state they where in when downloaded the example and got it to work. then i made the same changes in my own program and it works correct now. Thank you @vvaidya