Tasks

A task is created by right-clicking on the appropriate schedule element in the schedule manager tree and selecting "New Task".

A new task, populated with default values, will be created and automatically selected in the schedule manager tree.

When a schedule is first created, an initial task will be created at the same time.

Set the task execution order

See Setting the schedule's initial task for specifying which task should be executed first when a schedule is activated.

The task to be executed after this task has completed successfully can be specified by selecting the appropriate task from the "On Complete" drop down. A value of "Stop" indicates that the schedule should complete after this task has completed.

The task to be executed after this task has been terminated can be specified by selecting the appropriate task from the "On Exception" drop down. A value of "Abort" indicates that the schedule should terminate after this has terminated.

Session failure detection

By default, a task is configured to 'fail fast', ie. to immediately terminate the task if any sessions fail to start or terminate due to an exception. This can be overridden by unticking the Fail fast on any errors checkbox.

Note that detecting a task failure works differently when fail fast is enabled compared to when it is not.

• If a task is set to fail fast, a task is terminated when any errors in any of the sessions occur, e.g. if a resource couldn't be contacted or was too busy to create a session, or if a session raised an exception and terminated abnormally.
• If a task is set not to fail fast, a task is only terminated if an error occurs in all of its sessions – and that task termination only takes place when the last running session is detected to have failed.

Maintain scheduled sessions

When a task is executed, all sessions defined within it will be run concurrently.

There are no restrictions on sessions within a task. For example, multiple processes can be specified to run on the same resource. If such processes are exclusive, the task will be terminated due to the fact that the resource is too busy to run anything other than the first process.

Create a session

A scheduled session is created when a published process is dragged onto a resource, or vice versa.

Once a session has been created, it will be listed in the 'Scheduled Sessions' list.

Set process parameters

If a process in a session requires startup parameters, they can be configured by right clicking the appropriate session and selecting "Startup Parameters" from the context menu.

See the Start parameters help topic for further information on configuring start parameters.

Post completion delay

Adds a delay of between 0 and 1500 seconds to the end of a scheduled task before allowing the next task in the schedule to commence.

Delete a session

Right-clicking the session and selecting "Delete" will cause the session to be removed from the task.

A task cannot be saved directly – changes to a task implicitly cause changes in its parent schedule, so in order to save a task, its schedule must be saved.

See the Saving a schedule help topic for further help in saving a schedule.

A task can copied and pasted either to its parent schedule (cloning the task), or to a different schedule altogether.

Due to the way this is implemented, copying and pasting can only be performed within a single instance of the Blue Prism application – it cannot be copied from one running application and pasted into another.

A task is copied by right-clicking it and selecting 'Copy'

Once copied, it can be pasted into a schedule by right-clicking the target schedule in the schedule manager tree and selecting 'Paste'.

Note that this does not use the system clipboard and, as such, is unaffected by other cutting / copying operations. This also means that the copied task does not exist outside of the currently executing schedule manager.

A task can be deleted by right-clicking it in the schedule manager tree and selecting 'Delete'.

Note that any references to the task by another task (as its next task in an "On Complete" or "On Exception" drop down) or by the schedule (as its "Initial Task") will be reset to defaults when the task is deleted.