UiPath Community 20.10 Stable Release - Inter Process Communication

UiPath Community 20.10 Stable Release

IPC - Inter Process Communication Activities

We have just released a new activity package in preview: UiPath.IPC. Activities . You’ll find it as pre-release for now while we’re doing the final checks for the final stable version.

This set of two activities is useful for having two processes “talk” to each other. They are working only for processes running on the same Robot (same user, same machine).

Let’s imagine the following scenario: you have an always running background process that monitors, through tens of triggers, what happens on a Call Center Representative’s machine. Each time a call is put on hold, a new process is started through the RunParallelProcess 7 activity that informs the CCR every 30 seconds that a call is on hold and they should get it back.

Everything clear until now :slight_smile:, but what happens if the customer closes the call while on hold? How can the “parent” process inform the “child” one that the call is not on hold anymore and that it should not show the “call on hold” prompt again? Well… it couldn’t until now. This is where the new activity package comes into play.

UiPath.IPC. Activities contains these two activities:

Broadcast Message

An activity that allows you to send a message to a specific channel. You can send it on any channel and all the processes listening on that channel will receive the message.

For example, I’m sending a message to all the processes listening on the “OnHoldCalls”, stating that the call with the ID 34 was canceled.

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Message Receiver Trigger

This is a new Trigger type that can be used in order to receive broadcasted messages. It has to listen on a specific channel and also to be added inside a Trigger Scope activity. The message will be part of the args.Message argument.

Example: the child process that I explained previously, can have a trigger waiting for the “CallCanceled” messages, and anytime the message is received, it ends itself and does not display a prompt anymore.

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6 Likes

Hi @radutzp,

Thanks for the update. Is the channel using similar to message subscriber/notification aka messages delivered based on event subscription? Knowing it will help me to create better UiPath robot scripts.

Hi @GreenTea,

If I got your question rightly, yes, this behaves like an event subscription. In the receiver process, you subscribe to a certain event and from the publisher process, you emit the event.

Hopefully, this helps :slight_smile: Let me know if I misunderstood your question

1 Like

Hi @radutzp

Thanks for your prompt and straightforward response. This feature gives better control of process start and termination. :+1: