How are Forms and Approvals supposed to work?

I’m confused. I thought UiPath is supposed to streamline processes, such as getting approvals. No?

I’m learning about Action Center, and I thought it serves as sort of a ticketing center, where processes that need something to be done by an assigned person, kind of sit and wait for that person to log in and complete the task.

I followed 2 tutorials, one by Rakesh and one by Anders on AC. Simple process of submission of a request which must be approved by a manager. One was for reimbursement, one was for days off.

But I couldn’t get it to resume after the AC. Only when launched from Studio, could I get it to work. Once published to Orchestrator, the process would fail, whether launched from Orchestrator or from Assistant. So my question is: what is the UiPath way to accomplish the following workflow?

  1. User wants to submit a request – he launches a process
  2. Process presents a form for user (it already knows his info such as his name and email).
  3. The user fills out the request amount
  4. The process “knows” his manager and assigns a task to that person to approve or reject the request.
  5. The manager logs in and approves the request.
  6. Once approved, the user receives an email informing him of that fact

Perhaps if there’s no way to “resume” a process upon submission of the task, is there a way to trigger another process (the sending of the email) upon submit in Action Center, sending in all the variables to it?

If Action Center can’t handle this very basic thing, I don’t understand its purpose.

@Terry_Marr

ideally what you would do is to create a separate process for approval and email together…and the attended bot will send the details to other bot via queue or any other means that you like…and the other bot runs in unattended mode…gets the info and creates an action task…and waits for it and sends an email to the requestor

or you can create the form task as well in attended bot…and post the form id as queue item…use get form tasks in unattended bot and then use wait for resume …and let the bot send email

its not basic…you need to think like this…attended automations are to make their life simple…if manager takes 3 days to compelte the flow you dont want attended robot to wait for it…because the other person might log out as well when the approval is given…and basic thing here…attended robots cannot be triggered from orchestrator at all…user is the head of attended bots and not anyone else

cheers

Ok, so let me see if I understand what you are saying.

In this workflow of user launching process to request reimbursement, I should separate out into 2 workflows

Workflow 1:

  1. User launches “Request Reimbursement” process
  2. User is presented with form
  3. User fills out form and submits
  4. An Action Center Task is created for manager
  5. End Process

Workflow 2:

  1. Once manager clicks submit in Action Center task
  2. Original user is sent email with approval amount
  3. End Process

But my question is: how to trigger the second process based on the manager completing the task action?

Can you set up an orchestrator process that “listens” for specific types of tasks to be completed?

@Terry_Marr

Second process will have get form task and wait for resume activity…

Trigger happens at the end of first process using a start job activity…or add the form id to queue and you can use queue based trigger also

Cheers

Hi Anil–
Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions! I’m a beginner, so appreciate the detailed explanations!

So let me see if I understand:

Process 1:

  1. User launches
  2. User fills out form and submits
  3. Task is added to Action Center.
  4. TaskID is added to queue
  5. end process

Process 2:

  1. Triggered upon addition of TaskID record to queue?
  2. Job checks task ID to see if completed
  3. If no – pause and wait.
  4. If yes – fetch task details
  5. Send email to OP with results
  6. Remove task from queue
  7. end process

Do I have this right? So this leads to me to a question about #5 in Process 2. Is there a way to add not only the TaskID to the Queue, but also the name or “release key” of the job that I want to run on completion of the task? In other words, is there a way to set this up so the queue-checking job will not only get all the task details on completion, but then run a named job to handle it?

If so, that would be a flexible way to handle different sorts of actions. Is this possible?

Or maybe I’m over engineering this? Is there a way to attach code (or to run a job) to a submit button in Action Center form? If so, maybe I just need to figure out how to do that.

@Terry_Marr

Ypu can add releasekey and other details as you need

But rather than that…if you want to start different processes then while adding queue item…add the item to different queues and each queue can be tagged to unique process you would want to run

Cheers

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