Q 544. RPA platforms like UiPath provide four exception handling mechanisms - Continue, Ignore, Retry, and Abort. How will you select the right mechanism amongst these? Provide example scenarios to explain your answer.

 

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In the RPA platform where most of the time a robot executes at virtual machines, specifically in the case of the unattended robot where a user doesn’t have visibility of the processing part. RPA is rule or logic-based, It works like a human being (can automate specific tasks, replicate manual work keystroke by keystroke, calculating, data entry, automatic form fill, repetitive process, etc) RPA can be integrated into existing businesses for higher productivity

This reduces costs and eradicates errors that are common in back-office practices like data entry or invoice processing.  

In such situations, it becomes very significant to deal with the exceptions in the robot.

 

RPA Exception Handling

 

With the exception mechanism, we can write codes considerably “cleaner” and then have everything “automatically handled” and user-friendly.

 

Below are the four exception-handling mechanisms

·         Continue

·         Ignore

·         Retry

·         Abort

 

Continue - The Exception is rethrown

Ignore - Execution can continue from the next step after ignoring the exception

Retry - Activity with the exception is retried (# of attempts can be counted)

Abort - The Execution is aborted

 

When an exception is thrown, it should offer paths to take for further processing. This makes it much easier to handle exceptions meaningfully even when you don't know the exact context of their creation. This forces the programmers to

code exception handling very close to the decision-making hard-coded into the operation.

 

The most common errors in RPA can be classified into business exceptions or application exceptions.

When a software BOT is unable to process a transaction with programmed commands, In other words, the business exception is written into the automation’s exception code.

 

Example - 1 A robot processing invoices in a manufacturing firm may be programmed to process invoices up to $5,000. When it comes across an invoice valued at $8,000, the bot identifies it & is unable to process it, and throws a business exception alert.

 

 Example -2 if an RPA bot involved in onboarding new associates comes across an incomplete form that is missing the new associate’s PAN number, the bot will identify it must have this field to continue with the flow and throw a business exception.

 

In both cases, the robot records the exception and moves on to the next transaction.

An application exception happens when a robot encounters a technical issue, such as a server/System crash, or a change to the technology environment that requires interaction with a new application or website.

 

For example - A robot that must click a log-in button on a web application stops when the webpage does not completely load; sometimes these errors are incidental and can be fixed by repeating a few scopes of the process.

Balaji has provided the winning answer to this question. Well done!