I created a custom CodeActivity in C# that I am using in a sequence within a state machine in UiPath. The custom CodeActivity involves calling an API through an async method.
In some cases the robot just never ends. In other cases the robot fails with an error message: “An Activity can only get the location of arguments which it owns.”. This happens when I try to access the output value of the activity.
How can I do an async method call within a CodeActivity in UiPath?
Classes that derive from CodeActivity are synchronous by default. Since UiPath is based on Windows Workflow, deriving from an AsyncCodeActivity class should work.
You’ll need to inherit from AsyncCodeActivity<T> (<T> being optional) and implement both BeginExecute and EndExecute. But besides that, they don’t differ much, as the framework takes good care of managing the async part.
As we have the Inherited class of Execute within the code activity, you need to use a await modifier while assigning the result of the function return @Bena…
Here is an example of a simple test AsyncCodeActivity that waits for 1 minute and then sets an output variable.
This example uses the ApmAsyncFactory from the Nito.AsyncEx.Interop library.
I put it in my flow in UiPath and direct the output string to a variable. After the execution of the custom activity I try to popup a message box with the value of the variable.
When executing this the robot waits for 1 minute (the delay I put in my custom activity) and then I get an error.
I am following your sample to build one of my async code but I cannot find out how to get/use AsyncTaskCodeActivity. Could you explain where it could be found in VisualStudio?
Hi, I just wanted to answer this if someone was looking for a solution.
For a basic http request to an API you can make the execution synchronous.
I have an activity which fetches a list, loops through it and calls other endpoints with data from the loop. All http requests use .Result instead of await and then the activity runs inside UiPath.
This probably isn’t the “correct way” to get this result but it gets the job done until I find a better way.
And then you can use the activity inside UiPath and the robot will wait for the execution to finish and then continue with the workflow.
I haven’t been successful creating activities with AsyncCodeActivity but this works well with my usecase which is just fetching data and returning it in a formatted way.