Apps and Action Center

[AdityaVN (Aditya Vaddiraju)]

Hi

I encountered a strange situation.

I was developing a workflow where an input for the workflow is taken from Apps and this input goes through Action Center for approval from a Business User.

After approval result should display in the Apps window. I used Label Control in the App for the display.

Now the issue !!

The workflow is executing correctly and is giving desired output (checked in the logs) but the output is not getting displayed in Apps window.
When I disabled the Action Center sequence in the workflow, the same App gave output on the same Label Control I used in the App.

Can we not use Apps and Action Center together ?
Should the App be persistent when using with Action Center ?
Is this expected behavior?
or did I miss anything

@loginerror

[AndyMenon]

Did you try binding the output to a Text Box output instead of a label?

That might tell you if this behavior is by design.

Alternately, can you add a step in “when completed” of the Start process. In this case you might want to remove the static binding of the label with the output returned by the automation. If you have not done it already, my theory is that Action center processes are asynchronous. They can be created by one robot, and be picked up by another Robot after the humans clear the action.

If it works, it means that you have to do the work of binding the value yourself when the process completes .
If it doesn’t work it might mean that this very nature of how the Action center works might be why your app is not able to receive the output back. I could be wrong, but doesn’t hurt to try.

[AdityaVN (Aditya Vaddiraju)]

@AndyMenon thank you very much for the analysis.

I tried using Text Box and Text Area app didn’t receive output.
Tried by adding a step in “when completed” as suggested but app was not able to receive the output

to further debug I added a message when the state changes at the “Start Process” step and checked the option “Run Asynchronous”. Was getting messages when bot starts but when the bot recovered from suspended state there were no messages. May be this is something to do with Action Center.

Hopefully someone from UiPath look at this post… I was planning to develop bot that pushes the output to App when actions are completed in Action Center

[evan.cohen]

This isn’t officially supported today, but it should still theoretically work…

I think @AndyMenon is onto something… My guess: when the process gets into the suspended state (waiting for a human to respond in Action Center), Apps thinks the process is complete and evaluates the ‘When completed’ event for the rule. Then once the workflow actually completes nothing is happening on the Apps side because it thinks the process is complete. The way you could verify this is by adding a Show Message to the ‘When completed’ part of this rule and check to see when this gets triggered.

If that turns out to be the case, I have a couple ideas for how you could work around this while I look into it on our side:

1. Put the Action Center part of your workflow into a second process and use another robot to kick-off the task. Return the results back to the first process. The drawback here is that you would have an unattended bot constantly in use until the task is resolved…
2. Write the task results to Data Service and add a ‘refresh’ button in the app that checks to see if that tasks was created.

[AndyMenon]

Thanks @evan.cohen ! And thanks to @AdityaVN for taking a shot at this.

I was about to put an app layer on my DU flow that involves action center.

Aditya’s experience has helped bring this situation out front and helped all of us to be wary of it.

I have to reevaluate my approach.