Input file shared with business

Help Studio
1

Hi team,

just a question, how can handle the scenario where the robot needs to share and access the same excel file used by the business?

inside this file there is a list of items with which the business manages different processes, while for now we have to automate only one, I would like to avoid the conflict of access to the same file with them, possible solutions?

Thanks in advance

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2

@andreus91

Hope file is placed in some shared folder. If yes then copy the file from shared folder to local Bot folder and then read it instead of reading directly from Shared folder. So that both won’t get any conflict issues while accessing the file at the same time.

3

Thanks for your suggestion.

and how to handle updating the file after the process is complete?

4

Fine

There are two scenarios to be considered before proceeding further

  1. First if the file is in a shared drive then we can copy that file from that folder and paste that in a bot running server local drive and process KT

  2. Once after processing and saving the data in that File use MOVE FILE activity where pass the current local drive path as in source and destination as shared drive path
    Enable overwrite property so that it will overwrite the existing file

But the above method is fine if only bot is going to access that file

If it is being accessed by multiple bots then we need to have a separate folder to place the processed files in that same shared drive may be under the name Processed Files

Cheers @andreus91

5

Hi @Palaniyappan, thanks for your reply.

My problem is related to the fact that this excel file is also updated by the business during the process, so I was looking for possible workarounds to make sure to manage the access at the same time to the file.

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6

@andreus91 you can go for Workbook related activities. So that you and business can work on the same file parallely

7

I understand that
But that should not be the case when it comes to PROCESS STANDARDISATION

So as a part of standardisation we need to make sure that the file is not access by other users to avoid file corruption or application crashing

Cheers @andreus91

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8

Office 365 excel file could be a possible solution?

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9

Yeah either of these should help you

Sync/map the file to local drive

  • good way how to work with Sharepoint files is to sync the folders to local folder → then you can access it using standard Workbook activities

Or

Office 365 Activities

  • official UiPath package, very powerful, full of possibilities.
  • only downside is the setup is complicated and without your IT department, admin rights etc., it would not be easy. There is need to setup connection through Microsoft Graph, Azure etc.
    See more here: https://docs.uipath.com/activities/docs/office365-setup (
  • it is well documented and once you do the setup you can use all these super cool activities:

Cheers @andreus91