Resource PC HTTP interface

This document describes mechanisms for controlling a Blue Prism Resource PC using HTTP.

Communication can be via either HTTP GET or HTTP POST. Each mechanism simply wraps the basic resource PC commands, which can be issued over a telnet interface.

HTTP GET requests

Commands can be issued in the form of a URL. The command of interest (together with the arguments) appears as if it were the name of a document to be retrieved. For example the URL:

http://localhost:8181/create%20name%20MyProcess

corresponds to the command:

create name MyProcess

Note that special characters must be escaped, e.g. the space character must be written as %20. Any non alphanumeric characters in a process name for example will also have to be escaped. This can be achieved in javascript using the "escape()" function, or in the .NET framework using the "System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode()" function.

Multiple commands can be specified inline. For example, you may authenticate yourself (using the user and password commands) and start a process (using the run command) all in one go, as follows:

http://localhost:8181/user%20admin&password%20MyPassword&create%20name%20My%20Brilliant%20Process

Note that commands are separated by the & character.

HTTP POST requests

Commands can be issued as parameters within an HTTP POST request. For example the following message posted to "/automate" performs authentication and starts a process, just as the HTTP GET example above does:

POST / HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost:8181 User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 Content-Length: 92 Content-Type: text/plain param1=user%20admin&param2=password%20MyPassword&param3=create%20name%20My%20Process

The naming of parameters is not important, because the resource PC listener ignores them.