Pretty much every bot I develop for my company, I have a system of creating a daily report file containing a list of each transaction by the bot so that users can go and see the status of each row of an input, so they can see if it was successful by the bot or failed for various reasons. For example, I’ll use the input filename and line number and an exception reason or ‘Success’ message, and some other basic stats/totals.
I usually use the format of say BOTNAME_DD-MM-YYYY.xlsx so that they can easily view the performance of the bot on a daily basis, occasionally I will make this monthly instead.
The issue I have is, users tend to hit Start on the bot and then they are eager to open the report file and then while the bot is running it is unable to write to the same Report file while open by another user… the only workaround I have for this so far is for the Append Range activity be in a Try/Catch block and waits until the file is ready. This works fine, but users will be unaware the bot is ‘waiting’. I try to explain to them that when they run the bot, they need to ensure that any report files/input files are not open by other users or this will interrupt the process. But they don’t really follow my advice…
Is there a better way to manage this? Obviously, the bots need to write some kind of report file for client facing reporting on the bot status of each input/line processed. But I haven’t worked out a good system to avoid users interrupting the bot processing.