#872 OIC and Blue Prism RPA

 

I downloaded the BluePrism trial this morning, along with a set of 10 beginner labs they make available online.

Blue Prism Design Time

The focus of this post is not on how to design automations with Blue Prism; the 10 labs do a great job of that. The focus here is on how to invoke such from OIC. 

I will use the following process as an example - this is actually Lab4 

Blue Prism offers a rich set of process design actions -

 

Some of these have been used to add robustness to the process model, very important for mission critical automations.

The process shown above is very simple - it opens the Blue Prism website in InternetExplorer and searches for a specific topic - e.g. Coca Cola

So it is doing the following, from an automation perspective - 

1. open the page in IE
2. enter data - the search string - in the search box
3. press the search button.

I test this within the Blue Prism Design Studio and it works fine. The search value - Coca Cola - is hard coded, as you can see in the Data Items block above.

Now say I want to expose this functionality as a service - I will then need to define an input variable for the search string. This can be easily defined in the Start action. 

Essentially the input variable will be stored in the pre-defined Data Items field.

Next step is to expose this process as a web service - Blue Prism exposes these as SOAP services.

One needs to check the Enforce Document/literal encoding box.

This will generate a wsdl, hosted on the Blue Prism app server (I am using the on-premise version of the product). I save this wsdl locally.

  

I do a sanity test, using SOAP-UI - 

Here is the Blue Prism Search Page before the test - note the Search is for Coca Cola - 

Now I invoke the process from SOAP_UI, the search string set to Oracle -  and, quelle surprise, Oracle relevant articles are displayed.

looks good. 

Now to OIC...

I create a SOAP Connection, leveraging the wsdl generated by Blue Prism.

 

Note the use of the connectivity agent - as Blue Prism is installed locally on my laptop.

I now create an app driven orchestration -

The REST Trigger has the following Request payload -

I leverage the Blue Prism SOAP connection for the action I call InvokeRobot.
The SOAP Endpoint is configured as follows -

The Map is very simple - searchString from the request payload to - 

Now to a simple test of the OIC Integration - here is the status of the Blue Prism Search page before the test - Search for Oracle -

Here it is, after the test -

Very simple, like most of my blog post examples, however we are all experts at extrapolating.