Question
Simulating Robot Activities in Robot Runtime
We currently have numerous solutions setup using InteractionActivities. These are incompatible with RobotActivities and would require significant effort to rework the solutions to use them.
Has anyone had any luck simulating robot activities? The ask that we're trying to fulfill is preventing the bots from shutting down at the end of their scheduled time, if they are still actively working. This behavior was fixed in v19.1.54, but requires RobotActivities to function.
It seems RobotActivities are just assigning a case to the bot operator, which would inform PRPC that the bot is still actively working. Is there a way to do this directly with an API call and have it perform the assignment in the same manner a robot activity would?
Robot Manager is designed to work best with Robot Activities, so that would be the ideal way to work with it and have all the functions remain intact. As for a refactor to eliminate Interaction Activities, you should be able to perform a direct swap. Basically, create a work queue representing each of your activities and then replace the Interaction Activity with the corresponding Robot Activity. Depending on how nested and convoluted your are, this may be easy or may require some work, however in my experience, the use of activities has generally been consistent with places where you might use a Robot Activity (i.e. distinct functionality that you wanted to re-use).
This might require you to have the case handle the various activities and call them in sequence within the case rather than have one bot (or one activity) to fulfill the entire request end-to-end, but the end result is the same. If your process requires the application be in a specific state between your activities that it is not currently handling, then of course that would make your refactor a little more challenging.