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Hi all,

I have following problem statement. A customer wishes to place excel documents (template) on an SFTP shared location. The customer has write access and the bot too. However, this is a working space but the bot needs to read the files from this location. From my experience in development, I know that one cannot read a file if it is open or used by another process in Windows. So my question actually is: how does one go about this?
So a couple of questions:

  1. How do you build in controls to avoid that a bot goes in error because the input is not available? E.g. take a local copy by the bot.
  2. How do you best handle such input errors?
  3. Would you build in a retry mechanism? E.g. file is not available yet or fully saved yet but bot reads it in meantime
  4. How does this translate into code?
    Note that in this case it would be the customer’s responsibility if the bot cannot access the file.

Would love to hear how you would approach this problem, what are good practices to ensure smooth operation.

Thanks a lot.

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Hi @krisvandenbergh,
You can use for example ReFramework template which can be set to retry in case of failure or you can define additional action in case of exception. Another possibility is that you can copy the file from share if it’s not available to open and then make some changes and export it to the right location.