Building the First Blue Prism Process

Learn how to build the first Blue Prism process in this article by Lim Mei Ying who has extensive experience in designing, implementing and supporting Blue Prism processes as well as setting up a Robotic Operating Model for the enterprise.

With the increased popularity of RPA comes a multitude of products that offer robotic process automation solutions. The tool used in this article is Blue Prism. Blue Prism has been well received, with hundreds of companies (a number that is growing rapidly) around the world adopting Blue Prism as their robotic software of choice.

In this article, we will take a look at Blue Prism and use it to build our first process. Here's what we will be doing:
• Learning how to launch the Blue Prism interactive client
• Using Studio to create our very first process
• Editing the process by giving the robot instructions to follow
• Renaming and saving the process
• And finally, running the process for the first time

Inside a Blue Prism system

In its simplest form, the Blue Prism software is made up of three components:
• The Application Server that runs the Blue Prism services. It serves as the brain of the entire setup, performing functions such as connecting to the backend databases, scheduling, and storing logs.
• The Runtime Resource, which are more commonly known as the robots. They can be either physical or virtual computers.
• The Interactive Client installed on your desktop that allows humans to interact with the robots by developing processes, scheduling tasks, or monitoring the robot logs.

The three components pass information to each other on a constant basis in order to make the entire system work. In this article, we will assume that you have correctly configured the application server, runtime resources, and the interactive clients. As a robot trainer/developer, the tool that you will work with almost exclusively is the Interactive Client. The Blue Prism interactive client is the main software that will be used in the development of robotic processes.

Launching the Blue Prism interactive client

Once you have successfully installed the Blue Prism interactive client, you can launch it in any of the following ways:
• From the Start Menu, click Start | Blue Prism.
• Alternatively, you may choose Run | Blue Prism

The Blue Prism application is represented by a blue triangle. Double-click on the icon to open it. A sign-in screen appears. Follow these steps to sign in:

1. Choose the connection that your Blue Prism administrator has configured for you.
2. If you see a User Name and Password field, enter your Blue Prism credentials. This is an account that has been issued to you by your Blue Prism administrator. It is not your Windows username and password.
3. When done, click on the Sign In button.

The five tabs at the top menu bring you each of the modules available in Blue Prism. These five menu items are also available as buttons on the left navigation bar, as shown on the following screen. Click on each of them to see what shows up:
• Studio: This button provides a directory listing of all the processes and objects available in Blue Prism.
• Control: This is the place to schedule processes or run them on demand.
• Dashboard: The information shown here is the same as that of the home page. You can also create additional dashboards and view them from here.
• Releases: This is where you would go to create deployment packages or to import a package created in another environment.
• System: Contains all the configurable settings that you can set. As a developer, you would use this frequently to set environment variables, as demonstrated in the following screenshot:

The footer at the bottom of the page contains the bits of information, as shown in the following list of bullet points. The name of the connection becomes particularly important when you work with multiple Blue Prism environments. A typical scenario is to have an environment for development, another for quality testing, and a third for production. You would not want to unwittingly make changes to production that were meant for development, so it's always a good idea to check these values before making any changes:
• Previous logged-on time
• Current logged-on time
• Account that was used to log in
• The name of the connection
• The name of the database to which you are connected

Creating the first process

As developers, we will be spending most of our time with Studio. This is the place where we work with processes/objects. Let's dive right in and create our first process:

1. Click on the Studio button. The screen shows a tree on the left-hand side. The tree contains two leaf nodes at the top: Processes and Objects.
2. Right-click on Processes and choose Create Process.
3. The New Process dialog appears. Give the new process a name. Call it My First Process. Clickon Next.
4. Enter an optional description for the process. It's always a good idea to write a bit about what we are going to build so that others will know what the process is doing. For now, just provide a token description, for example: This is my first Blue Prism process. When you are ready, click on Finish.
5. The process shows up in the tree on the left, inside a folder named Default. Look at the panel on the right (refer to the preceding screenshot). It shows the date and time the process was created and who created it. Later on, as you edit the process, the list will grow to become an audit trail of who has edited the process and when.
6. From the tree, double-click on the newly created process. The process opens for editing in a canvas in Process Studio.

Getting to know the Blue Prism Process Studio

Most RPA programs today are code-free (or at least low code), and Blue Prism is no different. It provides a Visio-like canvas to sequence each step in the process. You design a flowchart that contains a sequence of steps. You can choose from a suite of ready-made actions what each step is supposed to do (for example, click a link or press a button). Finally, the steps are linked together with a definite start and endpoint. Let's take a quick tour of what it's comprised of:
• Top menu has all the commands and tasks that we will need to create our processes.
• Toolbar gives us quick access to commonly used commands and tasks.
• Toolbox contains the ready-to-use actions that you can drag and drop onto the canvas.
• Canvas is where we will draw the process flow diagram. Also, notice that the first and only page that we have opened is called Main Page. This is the starting point for all processes. In the canvas, we see three things:
• A start oval represents the starting point of the process
• An End oval represents the endpoint of the process
• A Page Information block provides a name and description of the process, as well as the preconditions and post conditions. This information is used solely for documentation purposes. It will be available in the auto- generated help file when someone looks up your process in Blue Prism Studio, as demonstrated in the following screenshot:

Adding pages

Now, let's do a simple exercise and start to shape our little purchasing process by adding more pages to it:

1. From the toolbox, click on Page. Drag and drop the page stage to the canvas.
2. In the dialog that appears, choose Add a new page and create a reference to it. Click on Next.
3. Give a name to the page. Let's call it Get List of items to purchase. Click on Finish.
4. The page object is added to the canvas as shown in the next screenshot. In addition, a new page is added to the process. It shows up just above the canvas as an additional tab:

5. Let's add a couple more pages to the process. Drag two more page stages to the canvas. Give them the following titles:
   • Search and Add Item to Cart
   • Send Email Notification

The screenshot should now look as follows:

6. From the toolbox, click on Link. Notice that the pointer changes to that of an arrow with a link. Use it to link up all the stages together from Start to End. The completed diagram is as follows:

Editing pages

We added three pages to the process. However, they are all blank since we have not coded anything in them. Let's add stubs to each page so that the process is complete:

1. Click on the Get List of Items to Purchase tab. The page was automatically created when we added the page block to the main page. At this point, it is completely empty, except for a Start and End block.
2. From the toolbox, drag and drop a Note block between the Start and End blocks. Double-click on the newly added Note block and write something in the Node Text section, for example, TODO:Add the logic on how to get the list of items to purchase. Click on Ok when done to close the dialog.
3. Use the Link tool from the toolbox to link up all the stages. The completed page should appear as follows:

4. Repeat the preceding steps for the remaining two pages that we created earlier.

And we are done! We may not have added much logic to the process yet. As of now, our little process has just the skeletal parts linked up together.

Renaming a process

We started off by naming the process My First Process. It is time to give it a name to better reflect what it is doing. Here's how you can go about renaming the process:

1. Go back to the main page.
2. Double-click the page information box.
3. Give the process a new name and description. We are naming the process Weekly purchase of groceries, as shown in the following dialog:

4. Click on OK to close the dialog. Save the process for the changes to take effect.

Saving a process

It's always a good idea to save your work from time to time. Besides, Blue Prism requires you to save a process before you can run it for the first time. To save the process, click on the Save button from the toolbar.

You may, or may not, get the following prompt that requests a number of notes before you can save. If you do, simply add some descriptive text to explain what changes have been made to the process. What you enter here appears in the version history of the process. Click on Save Changes when done:

Running the process for the first time

Now, let's give our little process a run. To run it, click the Gobutton from the toolbar. Look for the button with the green triangle and click on it. The Blue Prism Studio steps through each action block one by one. The action that it is currently executing is highlighted in orange.

If all goes well, you should see the process move from Start to the page blocks and then all the way to the end, with the final stage highlighted as shown in the following screenshot:

You can re-run the process any time. Simply press the reset button from the toolbar and press the Go button again. The robot steps through each stage at a comfortable pace. You can make it go faster or slower by adjusting the speed. Take a look at the Play button. Do you notice that it has a little down arrow next to it? Click on the arrow and a speed bar appears. Adjust the speed to be faster or slower by dragging the meter up or down. Try dragging the meter all the way to the top so that the speed is at its fastest. Run the process again and watch the robot move at the fastest speed.

Stepping through the process

Clicking on Go gets the robot to run through the entire process without any planned stops. To execute the process in a more controlled manner, you can use the following buttons on the toolbar:

• Step (F11) (1): Walks through each stage of the process individually and pauses at each stage. When it lands on a sub-page, it will step through the stages of the sub-page.
• Step Over (Shift + F11) (2): Behaves the same as Step. However, when it lands on a page, it will not open up the page, but execute it as a single unit.
• Step Out (F10) (2): While stepping through a sub-page, use Step Out to complete the execution of the sub-page in order to return to the calling page.
You could also run to a specific stage by right-clicking on the stage and choosing the Run to this Stage option from the context menu. There is also an option to start from a specific stage in the process by selecting Set Next Stage. Let's run the process again. This time, we will control the robot by stepping through the following stages:

1. From the toolbar, press Reset.
2. Press Step. Notice that the robot begins from the first stage directly after Start. In our case, that is Get List of items to purchase.
3. Remember that when Step lands on a sub-page, it will open it up and walk through it. Press Step again. Observe that the robot opens up the Get List of items to purchase sub-page and begins from its Start stage.
4. Now, let's fast forward to the End stage of the Get List of items to purchase page. Right-click on the End stage and select Run to this stage. The robot automatically moves from Start to the Note stage, and finally the End stage.
5. Press Step one more time. The robot exits the sub-page and takes you back to the Main page. The next stage, Search and add item to cart, is highlighted.
6. To speed things up, let's process the sub-page in a single step. Press Step Over. Instead of opening up the sub-page, the robot processed Get List of items to purchase in a single step and jumped straightaway to the next stage, Send Email Notification.
7. Press Step one more time to open up the Send Email Notification stage. Now, press Step out. The robot jumps out of the Send Email Notification page and back to the Main page.

As you can see, the step controls are very useful for controlling the robot as it works through the process. When you get more comfortable with the controls, you may favor the use of the keyboard shortcuts over the buttons on the toolbar.

If you found this article interesting, you can explore Robotic Process Automation with Blue Prism Quick Start Guide to learn how to design and develop robotic process automation solutions with Blue Prism to perform important tasks that enable value creation in your work. Robotic Process Automation with Blue Prism Quick Start Guide gives you a solid foundation to programming robots with Blue Prism. If you've been tasked with automating work processes, but don't know where to start, this is the book for you!