Automatically run bots on new queue item

Awesome! Just been discussing how some robots to start based on queue items with the team. When this due to be released?

Hi @badita,
Coming back to the original question, what would be the best solution for this question given the features we have till date.
“can a bot be initiated from the entry of an item into a queue or does the bot need to be running constantly looking for a queue item?”

@ankit002 Looks like its a “Scheduler” item. They’ve renamed it Triggers. Now a trigger can be a time OR a new item is added to the queue.

If you read that description, it reads “Start a job when new items are added to the queue” - thus initiating a bot from the entry of an item into a queue.

The trigger takes the place of needing a bot monitoring a queue.

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Thanks for your response @sagacity.

So i found Trigger under schedule section in Orchestrator like you mentioned. There are options to set the frequency for the schedule to run, How do i set it to Start a job automatically when a new item is added to queue?

@ankit002 It hasn’t been released yet. Its planned for version 19.10.

@sagacity Okay. So for the processes we already have, should we schedule bots and trigger them every 1 minute to make sure all items of queue are being taken care ?

@ankit002 You can do that, or, if you have the bot to spare you can utilize the “Wait Queue Item” by having you bot run in an endless loop (rather than triggering a new job every 1 minute)

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@sagacity Always good to have multiple options!!

Appreciate your help. :slight_smile:

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Interesting, but in looking at the Screen Shot, where is the tie in or relationship to the Queue defined…? I do not see any place to select a given Queue Name…?

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What is the expected time to release 19.10 version?
@badita

we target late october. I don’t have exact dates.

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Thanks @badita, good to knew it will release in 2019 only.

It’s out in the cloud.

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Using the queue trigger , I have found an interesting issue.

I have one process that runs takes a few hours and processes 1000s of records and puts 100s of items into a Queue.

The second process is called by the trigger and deals with one item on the queue. The reason why one item only is that this second process takes a few minutes to process. Plus we have other jobs running and we don’t want those jobs waiting until all the items are processed from the queue.

The interesting part is while the first process is running and adding items to the queue, the second process is called properly. Once the first process is done, there is probably 100-150 items in the queue. And the trigger ONLY calls the 2nd process every half hour to process a transaction item in the queue.

Wondering why this is happening

Here is a screenshot of my trigger

@mdorocicz It’s because by default, the queue trigger checks for new, unprocessed items every 30 minutes. You can change the check interval by adjust this property on Web.Config file: Queue.ProcessActivationSchedule. The property accept value between 0-59. The queue trigger will start a new job when a new item is ADDED to the queue or at that time interval. I hope UiPath updates their documentation for Queue Trigger so users will not be confused about this.

Refer to this post:

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Thanks for the comment. Feel free to send your suggestions for the documentation directly on the docs page :slight_smile:
Every bit helps a lot.

More on it here:
How to suggest edits for our documentation at docs.uipath.com!

Interesting.

We have a process where the queue item needs to start immediately. This is not necessarily the case for all processes and so if I set that variable to 0, it would change for all processes.

@loginerror or @badita did you consider this when implementing the feature? Are there any drawbacks you encountered by having a process specific timing variable? I guess instead of a common trigger from the Orchestrator it would require n amount of differential triggers for each of the processes that utilises this functionality.

Edit: Just saw the post that @vgbot was referring to where you mention that new items should fire instantly, and only retried and postponed items are in scope for the ‘scheduled’ trigger.

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Yes, new items should fire instantly. Seems that there are some issues with this only in environments with very high load. If that is the case it is a bug so please open a ticket or a new topic.

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@badita, could you please let me know how can i schedule the queue trigger for a specific time period every day. Let’s say I want the bot to run between 8AM to 8PM every day only. The same feasibility is there in Time trigger wherein we can schedule it through cron expresion, however in queue trigger when i explored the “Disable Trigger at” it is giving me an option to select one particular date and time to disable it.

Just to summarize, would you like a queue trigger that is only active in some particular time of the day?

I suppose currently you will need to have a simple separate process that will enable and disable the queue trigger using the Orchestrator API.

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