Unattended bot will not fail due to timeout

[s3vn (Joe Perri)]

Hi All!

I have been having an issue with one of our processes for the past week on all of our workstations (but only with this one process). The process uses SAP and after saving an order SAP is sitting at the transaction screen locked up. I figured that the bot should fail to find the activity (or next activity) after 30 seconds but it will sit there for hours never continuing.

At first I thought the issue was that the activity’s WaitForReady property was set to Interactive. I changed it to NONE and it seemed to fix the issue for half a day, but then it came back again.

Then I tried updating the packages to the newest versions and that seemed to fix the issue for a day, but it came back again.

I also tried changing out the Call Transaction for a Type Into activity, but the issue continued. I am running out of ideas and was hoping someone has seen something like this before?

[LevKushnir]

HI @s3vn

What about this solution

You can use Invoke Workflow with a timeout while executing it Isolated (it will run in a separate windows process). This timeout value would be the expected maximum workflow execution duration + extra time as buffer.

If sap freezes and the workflow invocation reaches the timeout you would have the exception thrown and you can handle it in your workflow as you desire.

So summary of solution:
Invoke Workflow File" with the “Isolated” property checked + Timeout property set

Best regards, Lev

[s3vn (Joe Perri)]

@LevKushnir

HI @s3vn

What about this solution

You can use Invoke Workflow with a timeout while executing it Isolated (it will run in a separate windows process). This timeout value would be the expected maximum workflow execution duration + extra time as buffer.

If sap freezes and the workflow invocation reaches the timeout you would have the exception thrown and you can handle it in your workflow as you desire.

So summary of solution:
Invoke Workflow File" with the “Isolated” property checked + Timeout property set

Best regards, Lev

That’s interesting, so the workflow runs as a separate UiPath bot process on the machine?

[LevKushnir]

I believe the bot process itself spawns some executor process. And this checkbox makes the workflow run in a separate executor process

[s3vn (Joe Perri)]

Hi @LevKushnir!

This change seems to be working, do you think the original issue could be a bug?

Thanks,
s3vn

[LevKushnir]

@s3vn

Happy that provided solution solve your troubles.

Please see also the thread below, where we are discussing reasons what is happing, when “SAP is hanging”:

Timeout property if the SAP session has hang or disconnected

Hi all, Thanks for your feedback! Can you please tell me which statement better describes your situation? The activity (SAP.ReadStatusBar or other, like a Click which triggers a time-consuming operation in SAP) would succeed if you gave it enough time. But you still want it to fail, if it takes longer than a precise amount of time. Eg: the activity succeeds in 31 seconds, but you want it to fail if timeout is set to 30 seconds. The activity has no chance to succeed, no matter how big the…

The original issues sounds like not a bug from this point of view

Best regards, Lev