Scheduling IBM RPA (Robotic Process Automation) – WDG- processes into HWA

​HWA let any user in any industry segment to automate anything and run anywhere, it’s an enterprise scheduling product which has been around for many years, it automates business flows and is most focused on back-end (non-human) automations. Virtually any task that can be scripted are able to be scheduled on HWA. Acting as a universal scheduler it interconnects automations running on legacy applications at data centers to modern workloads running on containers in cloud environments.

IBM RPA is an automation product which primarily automates UI-based tasks, for example old systems that lacks command line or APIs can be automated by creating “robots” on IBM RPA. Those robots transcribe human-based actions into an executable “script” or robot which can be scheduled from IBM RPA.

By integrating HWA and IBM RPA we can interconnect both unattended (back-end) automations and GUI-based automations as well as benefit from all the advantages an enterprise scheduling brings, like notification, audit, advanced monitoring, and scheduling capabilities.

At the time of this blog post, HWA integrates with three market leader RPA products, which can be accessed here.  On this blog post we will go through how to schedule jobs running on IBM Robotic Process Automation.

IBM RPA provides two mechanisms to trigger robots on its target systems. Via Synchronous API or Asynchronous APIs, both can be triggered via HWA by leveraging restful job type.

IBM RPA Synchronous API:

The synchronous API is exposed on the IBM RPA runtime agent, any bot that has been published on the same RPA server as the agent can be triggered. This method is the easiest to accomplish but lack main functionalities such as security and load balancing.

• To illustrate this process, first we create a bot on RPA Studio, this bot will just write a info message.

Figure 1 Bot on RPA Studio

• To create an HWA job to run a bot on RPA via synchronous is straightforward. Create a new job type “restful”, on action we will provide the API which is listening on the RPA runtime agent.  In this example we will run the bot named HWATestBot, and we will pass the unlockMachine=false parameter. With this parameter the bot tries to connect to an existing user session.

Figure 2 Restful job type action

Figure 3 shows a success job execution, figure 4 shows the job log on IBM RPA.

Figure 4 Script job execution on IBM RPA

IBM RPA asynchronous API:

The asynchronous API is more robust and is exposed on the RPA server instead of the runtime agent. The main advantage is the ability to perform workload management options.

The API will allow us to run process definitions, it creates an instance for the defined RPA process thus running the automation script(s) that is listed on the process step.      Bellow picture displays a process sample, it’s composed by a queue, process, and step(s). 

Figure 5 RPA process definition

Once the IBM RPA process is created / identified, it can be scheduled via HWA, figure 6 shows an SAP process chain that once finished triggers an IBM RPA bot. Let’s dissect the IBM RPA jobstream on HWA.

Figure 6 IBM RPA job execution flow

• First job is a restful job type, it uses the tenant id as a http header, the body content type is x-www-form-urlencoded notice we can pass the username / password as parameters, so it’s protected by HWA.

Figure 7 IBM RPA login job

• Second job triggers the IBM RPA bot, it uses the workspace tenant and process id. They can be received by calling the workspace and account endpoint, as they are static there is no need to create jobs for them. 

          Notice the Bearer token is received from the result of the first job “LOGIN_TENANT”, with it, we can authorize the RPA              API and run the Bot.

Figure 8 IBM RPA Bot job trigger

• An ID is returned as a result of the bot been triggered. We will use the ID to check the bot status and leverage the output conditions to check if has the string “done” (so we can mark the job as success) or if it’s not done, we will wait for 2 minutes and them check again by re-running the WDG-PROCSTATUS jobstream.

Figure 9 Check RPA bot result

On IBM RPA user interface, under Manager workflows we can confirm the step TheOneAndOnlyJC was completed (Execution status = Done).
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Figure 10 IBM RPA execution flow

As showed, HWA can integrate and interconnect multiple systems, including Robotic process automation with minimal glue code between them. If you are connecting HWA with RPA or any other application do send a message here or on LinkedIn. 

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Juscelino Candido de lima Junior
HCL Workload Automation - IT Architect/Technical Advisor

Juscelino has over 15 years in the IT industry, at IBM, he started as an IT Specialist - Workload Automation,  in the last five years working as an infrastructure and application IT architect. His areas of expertise include multi-cloud architecture, containers, microservices, observability, virtualization, networks, distributed systems, systems administration, production control, and enterprise job scheduling. IBM Master Inventor with +20 filed patents.