#873 OIC & Blue Prism part 2

 

This post goes into a bit more detail, especially on the Blue Prism side. The use case today is that of updating an excel sheet - Here's mine - today we are doing employee assessments and we will leverage Blue Prism to automatically assign performance values, based on the employee rating. Apologies to any Liam Mellows fans out there.

The employees have been rated - the performance fields just need to be updated. Our digital worker will take care of this.

The OIC process will invoke Blue Prism, passing the name of the excel sheet to be processed.

The Blue Prism process is as follows - 

  

Thanks to the following page for the instructions on how to create the above.

The logic is simple enough - 

• Open workbook - Open the excel sheet
• Get Collection - here we copy the workbook contents to the Employees collection
• Loop over each employee entry
• Update each employee performance field based on their rating
• Write Data - update the Excel sheet
• Save Data - Save Excel Sheet
• Close Workbook - Close Excel Sheet

The process leverages the Blue Prism VBO(Visual Business Object) for Excel. This VBO is pre-seeded in the product. Think of this as an Excel adapter, providing us with functionality such as open close, write, save etc.

 

You see on the left a Data Item - Workbook Name. This is the variable which holds the name of the excel sheet to be processed.

I click on the big box - NiallCEmpPerformanceProcess - and check Publish this Process to Control Room.

 

Notice the Start and End actions - here is where I can define the request and response fields -

As you can see, I get the response value from a Data Item called, yes - you've guessed it - Response.

Simple enough - let's expose this process, creating the wsdl -

 

I save the generated wsdl locally - 

and use it in creating a new SOAP connection in OIC - 

The Integration is very simple - 

I activate and test - 

I check the Excel sheet - 

I can also check the run in the Blue Prism Control Panel -

I can also see the request value, sent by the OIC Integration - 

As well as the response returned -