Triggered by sharepoint list without the use of unattended robot

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1

Hello im looking for a way to trigger a job based on changes in a sharepoint list. The thing is we were allotted to work on 2 attended robots, all are stored in a virtual machine.

  1. Me thinking if i can run one particular attended robot 24/7 in the virtual machine and do monitor events activity?

  2. If yes, can it monitor changes in the sharepoint list to trigger a job?

  3. Similar to queue trigger, can it accumulate the no of changes in the sharepoint list (i.e. 10 items in list was modified) before it can trigger a job?

2

Hi @ZARA_Clark_Vincent_M,
You need to think how would you personally do this and then try to automate it that way.
For example you could have a robot which will check latest file timestap (it could be stored in file). Then compare it with current timestamp. If there is a change → run the job, if no ->wait until next checkup.
For saving changes you could just have a copy task in your proces which will save the backup of current file before the modification.
Sky is the limit! :slight_smile:

3

Hi Pablito,

I was thinking every time an item in sharepoint list has been changed (i.e. status from pending to filing), uipath will monitor such event, then trigger a job.

Given the above example, my questions are:

  1. What particularly event can we associate the modification of the sharepoint list so uipath can pick it up to trigger a process
  2. What activity can i run to be able to run a particular job/process? assuming i already published the package to the orchestrator
4

Hi Clark,

There is an activity to run Jobs–> start Jobs. But better try using the API. Also, Have you checked MS Power Automate. If your company (Zara?) uses it an has a premium licence, you can monitor the sharepoint from there and call your UiPath Orch API

5

Hi Zara,
I am thinking out loud with this suggestion.

  1. If you already have Microsoft 365, you could make a flow (Microsoft Automate) which checks for changes in your sharepoint list/column. This would be a so called Trigger activity in Flows.

  2. When the Trigger is recieved, you can use the Uipath API call to trigger a job/process from Flows via the HTTP module (one of the actions in Flows).

  3. Uipath robot does its job

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Uipath API will run even in an attended robot?

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Yup we are using power automate (flow) to automate anything related to sharepoint list, basically we want to explore if we can intergrate what we are currently doing in power automate with uipath. So my question is if we only have attended robot, can we use it to monitor and receive API call from power automate? This is under the assumption that we will run the attended robot in virtual machine 24/7

8

OK, I think the Orchestrator API won’t work for you, since attended robots can’t run jobs called from the Orchestrator and I assume this extends to the API as well. Try getting a look onto Robot API. If this doesn’t work for you, then probably you’ll have to resort to what you were already mentioning: 24/7 process monitoring that SharePoint. Maybe you can use the orchestrator API (calling it from flow) to accumulate the number of modification in the list into an Asset. Then your robot can run 24/7 only executing the “real” process when that asset reaches 10? (and setting it back to 0).

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I would say, this integration is possible but does have its challenges.

Step 1: Since you mentioned your robot client/server/vdi is running 24/7 all you have to do is write a bat script with following (Quotes if your paths contain spaces between characters):
"yourpath\UiRobot.exe" execute --file "yourpath\yourProcess.xaml"

(We have used this method before and it allowed us to run a BluePrism process and trigger a UiPath attended robot! Fun times trying to migrate from BP to UiPath.)

Step 2: Trigger to check changes in your Sharepoint List/column

Step 3: From Flow/Microsoft automate, it seems to be possible to run the above bat script on your robot client/server/vdi via a data management gateway using powershell. (We have not tried this yet, but it does look promising.)

Challenge 1: Logging into the robot client/server/vdi to run the powershell command (Step 3). Since BluePrism has a wonderful login agent, it was easy for us to log into the robot machine and run the powershell script. I am not sure how the data management gateway solves this.

Challenge 2: Ensuring your process has all interactions (type-into, clicks) in simulate type. If your process already has this covered, then I dont think you will have to worry about Challenge 1. Robots do open applications even from lock screen and can complete processes without logging in provided the applications/process allow simulate actions.