Process Studio

Process Studio plays a key role in the Blue Prism package – it provides the ability to create, edit and test processes using a graphical drawing interface with drag and drop process components.

The process area (the main white region) is the area of the screen where processes are designed and tested using the flowchart components in the toolbox. To draw a process, select a drawing object from the toolbox and click the region on the canvas where you want the object to appear. Alternatively, drag and drop the object from the toolbox onto the canvas.

Whilst the mouse pointer is over the canvas, the pointer changes to show the object currently selected. This behaviour can be disabled by using the View...Dynamic Cursor menu option at the top of the screen.

A grid is provided in order to make it easier to align objects within the process, and a snap to grid option will align each object placed with the nearest gridline. Both of these options can be enabled or disabled via the View menu.

It is possible to Zoom to varying degrees of precision using the View...Zoom menu, and Undo and Redo functionality is also implemented, via the Edit menu.

Once a flowchart has been designed and checked visually, it is a good idea to run through the process in debug mode, which will enable the designer to iron out problems in the process before it becomes published for use in Control Room.

You can learn more about designing processes on the, flowcharts help page.

Stage logging and warnings

During process execution, details of each stage can optionally be recorded in the session log; this is achieved by using the Stage Logging option on the relevant stage properties screen. The following options are available:

• Enabled – The stage is always recorded in the session log
• Disabled – The stage is never recorded in the session log
• Errors only – The stage is only recorded in the session log if an error is encountered

For action stages where logging is not disabled, the values of any input/output parameters can also be recorded by ensuring the Don't log parameters on this stage checkbox is not checked. (Note that password data items are always masked).

By default logging is enabled on all new stages created for a process, and all new Exception stages created for an object. The logging option can be changed for all (or a selection of) stages via the Edit menu.

Stage logging can also be overridden if necessary at individual resource level see Resource Management.

For information about viewing the resulting logs see Session logs.

If a stage in a process exceeds the warning threshold configured either at the system or stage level, the status of the session is changed to Warning and noted as such in Control Room. For more information, see System settings.