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Process Steps

A process Step is used to divide the process into smaller steps. This increases the reliability of the processing, offers opportunities for specific optimizations, without having to modify the entire process. It also offers the possibility to have Process Steps processed by the Spider at a later stage.

Terms

For each process Step, the following should be observed:

  • Exception calendar: When should the process Step not run?
  • Restart from Failed: May the process Step be restarted if a request goes wrong?
  • Scraping: After how much time may the process Step be scraped?
  • Four Eyes: Does a four eyes principle apply?
  • NeedsOK: Is approval required from an employee before the Process Step may proceed?
  • Runtime: When is the process Step allowed to run?

Process Step - Create

After we create the Exception Calendar we are going to create a Process Step. From the Menu, select Process Steps > Maintain. Then click on Add new. Process Step

The next screen is explained in steps below.

Details

Process Step

  • Subject: Enter a short clear name for the Process Step.
  • Description: What does the Process Step do?

Exception Calendar

Process Step

Select the desired Exception Calendar. If it does not already exist, follow Exception Calendar creation

Restart from Failed

Process Step

May the Process Step be restarted if it goes wrong?

  • [] Example 1: This Process Step creates a random Id for a user and may not do so again if it fails. Then check the option

  • In Spider from version 1.6.7 on, there is the possibility to set a Process Step, that went wrong to a Successful status.

  • [] Example 2: This process Step performs an import and may do so again if it goes wrong. Then the option does not need to be checked.

Max Processing time for Scraping

ProcessStep

Scraping is used to ensure that processes do not get stuck. Should this unexpectedly take longer it can happen that this request will not be processed. This is an undesirable situation.

To prevent the request from being considered lost, we want to:

  • Let it fail, so the request gets a Failed status.
  • Retry it, so the request is returned to Todo or RFN status or Running (if a process step has been successfully completed).

Info

On the Spider Settings page, you can set when the Scraping Process should run. By default, the Hangfire job runs by default every 30 minutes. If the scraping time for a process step needs to be shorter, also adjust the value on the Spider Settings page. More information in Scraping

Extra options

Process Step

  • Four eyes: The four eyes principle. If a 2nd robot needs to verify this request check this box.
  • Needs OK: If a person needs to give an approval or rejection when the NeedsOk is triggered.

Runtime

From version 1.6.11 the Priority within the Runtime functionality has been activated. Within a processStep you can now set a priority between 1 - 99. Requests that are added for the process will be automaticly have a priority set for the underlying processStep.

ProcessStep

In this scheduler you can set the priority of the processStep to be processed in contrast to other ProcessSteps and requests.

By default the Runtime priority is set to 1. This means that a request processed for this ProcessStep will be handled as a request with the lowest priority.

!!! Tip Be aware that the settings are set for the processStep. So if this processStep is also used in other Processes, the Runtime priority will also count for there.

More information about the priority values and processing sequence is explained in Runtime Priority

Save

Process Step

As a final step, click on Save to save the created Process Step.