Attended bot able to run behind locked screen?

Hello everyone,

At my workplace, I have to work with Orchestrator and various Robots installed on virtual machines.
I’m not the person who made the original installations of the Orchestrator and the Robots. I don’t really have documentation to understand what has been done in the past. The people who did it are gone.
I ran some tests to understand things, and I’m quite confused.

The most significant information I have is an Excel file with all the installed bots, the type of bot, the VM where it is installed, and the licence keys.

So i went to a VM with only an attended bot installed.
From the UiPath documentation, I was expecting that this bot wouldn’t be able to run behind a locked screen.
However, I ran locally a package, locked the Windows session, unlocked, and it was still running.
I thought, maybe the robot doesn’t abort, but just pauses itself.
So I did the test again, only this time with a process that generates a log message every second. I locked the Windows session, unlocked, and checked the log messages. There wasn’t any pause, there was a log message every second, even when the screen was locked.

  1. So what’s up with this ? Either the information in the Excel file is wrong (the bot actually is unattended), or the screen lock is not really a screen lock ? I used the Ctrl+Alt+Suppr button on the top menu of the VM. What do you think ?

  2. How do I know for sure the type of robot installed on my VM ? Is there a command to run, a settings file to open ?

Thank you very much by advance for your replies.
I leave on a 3-week holiday tonight, so I might not be able to reply frequently/soon.

See you,
Amaury

A bot is just a program - and like any program, it can run and interact with the OS even when the screen is locked. Like writing data to files or making network calls, etc.

However, what it may not be able to do is interact with the environment as a human would - with keyboard and mouse clicks. You should test if you can interact in this way by doing a simple open a web page, click on a link and then enter and fill a text box and see what happens.

That being said, you may be confusing the terms unattended/attended. Here’s UI Path’s explanation:

So whether attended or not has no bearing on a locked screen - both bots run in a way that emulates o human sitting there at the computer. The key difference is scheduling and triggering. Unattended means it can be controlled by Orchestrator scheduling an log into the bot machine, run its process and exit. Attended means the user starts the bot and it runs on their environment (can’t log into its own session). Because of this they often run processes that require human interaction to operate (like making decisions for the bot, etc.)

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