CHAPTER THREE, process studio. In this chapter, we'll be going through a basic overview of what process to do is. We'll talk about decision stage, calculation stage and data items. basic overview. As mentioned before, processed to use the area where process flow diagrams are created. process diagrams are simply various stages connected logically using links.

These stages are dragged and dropped from stage panel into the process flow designer panel where they can be corrected to other stages, resized, formatted, used to operate upon data or perform any computations. Process studio can be accessed by using the corresponding ribbon tab at the menu bar here or by simply clicking on this studio button. process flow control. control bar within the process studio provides RPA developers with many options to control the flow of execution of a program. The major functionalities among these are first the goal, this button starts the execution of a program. The arrow next to it is used to set the speed of the program execution, which may be altered during or before the runtime as well.

Pause button. This button pauses the running program which can be resumed upon re execution step this button is used to step into one stage at a time of a program. You can also use a shortcut which is simply the F 11 key from the keyboard reset. This resets the execution path of the program. sets it back to the original position the start node of the main page. Process validation.

This option checks for any validation errors like mandatory property is not set up or blank input output values, incorrect expression syntax etc. and let the user know to fix them before starting the execution. Right. Next decision stage decision stage is used to make decision within a process flow diagram. Going through this stage, the program gets to make a decision based on the validity of a condition and correspondingly chooses the direction of its execution. The conditional state statement is put in the form of an expression which uses the formula to perform the computations Let's take a sample exercise to showcase the use of decision stage.

And this, we'll check if a number is greater than the other number or not. Right? So, one is greater than two. Let's take two static numbers here. And then we could simply connect them to we can use copy and paste same as like Ctrl C Ctrl V the way we use in any Windows applications. So, this checks whether the condition one is greater than two or not, is it?

No, then that means the no condition. This direction would be followed by the program during the exit. Let's try and run this program. And as you can see, this end stage was the one that was executed we could have put in more computations in here before simply ending it, but just to give a highlight and to give an overview of how the decision stage works, the program works just fine. Next is calculation stage which is right here. So, similar to the decision stage calculation stage also incorporates an expression in it.

The only difference is that the value computed in the expression here needs to be stored in a data item. In decision box, the conditions validity is checked then based upon it the direction of the program is decided. Whereas, in calculation stage expression, whatever we are going to put in here will be evaluated and the resultant value This computation is saved in the data item Okay, next is the data items, data items you can see are available here. And these are simply variables that hold values within them. These items have a data type associated, which defines the nature of values the variable is permissible to hold. Various data types supported in blue prism, include date, time, date, text, number, time, binary etc.

Data items are not linked to the process flow. They exist as separate entities and are used within several other stages to store values in them. They're also used in expressions to compute values and the resultant can be stored in same or other data types of data items of Same time. Let's take a sample exercise, we'll take two their items, we'll name them as variable one and variable two, we're going to put their data type as number, and we're going to provide them an initial value. So initial value is going to be like the value that will be given to the variable. As soon as the program execution starts, this would be the initial default value of that variable of that data item.

So let's say the variable one is five. Right, and it is right here. We can also copy and paste the variable just to make the process easy, but we can also drag and drop it from the stage panel here. We get the variable to provide the initial value as 15 and we also get a variable called result Let's reset the program because we want to start it initially. And now we're going to use the calculation stage. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna do division operation.

And to perform any operations on the data items directly, we have the all the data items available to this particular stage on this right panel here, right. And what we can do is to use any data item, we simply drag and drop it into the expression builder here. So we take variable two, we divide it using this operation variable one, and we store the result. So we haven't changed the, we haven't given the data type as number two, once the data type is given, then only the variable becomes sort of like activated because now It has some, I mean, the process can or the process flow can comprehend that what type of values it can store and it is like usable, the data items become usable. So now we have the result and this is where we are going to store the data. So we hit OK. And we connect the process using blanks like this.

And on computation, we're gonna do it like this. Once we reset it, there are no errors. That means syntactically the program is perfect, it's impeccable, no issues whatsoever. And we run the program and and then and we got the result as three. So that's how we get to you know compute any operations that we may want to perform within our process. Another quick thing to note is, when we are dealing with expressions, V are usually given with a validated pattern.

Any expressions that you're going to use, right, you can always validate and see if the expression is valid or not. It's a very quick check and always a very good recommended practice to see your operations are comprehensible for the bot for the process flow or not. Right. All right.