Appian Services Actions
This content applies solely to Appian RPA, which must be purchased separately from the Appian base platform.

Appian Services actions extend robotic process automation capabilities within your Appian applications. Using these actions, your process can automatically send data to or request data from Appian numerous times throughout the process execution. These actions occur without initiating an Appian process model, making communication faster and simpler.

Additionally, these actions are built for ease of use between environments:

  • It automatically references the environment's base URL so there's no need to hard-code it in the robotic process or update it when deploying to Production.
  • Authentication is simpler and more secure by eliminating the need to use environmental variables and credentials. Appian actions are executed in the context of the user who starts the robotic process. In most cases, the robotic process initiator is actually the service account that already authenticates Appian and Appian RPA. The Appian Services actions rely on this authentication mechanism when executing robotic processes, eliminating the need for additional credentials to be defined in the Appian RPA Console or referenced in the robotic process code.

Appian Services allow you to easily configure actions in a user interface and call robotic process variables to use as values or store returning action results.

This page describes how to use actions in the low-code module. If you need to extend Appian RPA capabilities, you can use Java to create workflow libraries for robotic processes.

Using Appian Services actions

Appian Services allow you to configure the following actions through a user interface:

Evaluate expression

The Evaluate expression action allows you to write and evaluate regular expressions and Appian expressions directly in your robotic process. This action provides an expression pane where you can call Appian expression rules (rule!) and constants (cons!), reference robotic process variables (pv!), and use Appian functions to format and aggregate your data.

This action is particularly helpful with conditional actions. With this action, you can create an if statement that can determine which output the robotic process should follow. In a generic action, this action allows you to determine a variable's value using logic, allowing your data to be dynamic.

Configuration

Click Edit to enter an expression. Enter a regular expression or Appian expression. As you type, the editor suggests functions and objects to reference in your expression.

Output

  • Operator: Select an option to store the result as a single-value variable (is stored as) or add the result as a multiple-value variable (is appended to).
  • Target: Enter the name of the robotic process variable where you want to store or append the result. If your process variable is type CDT, you can specify which field of a CDT to store the result into using dot notation.

After completion

  • Wait before executing next action: Enter the number of seconds the robotic process waits before it continues to the next action in the workflow.
  • Take a screenshot: If you select this option, the robotic process takes a screenshot of the resource immediately after the action completes successfully.

Is expression true?

The Is expression true? action allows you to write and evaluate Appian expressions that return true or false. If the result is not true or false, the value is cast to a Boolean type. For example, non-zero values like -1, 1, 2 return true, and 0 returns false.

Configuration

Click Edit to enter an expression. Enter an Appian expression. As you type, the editor suggests functions and objects to reference in your expression.

Output

  • Operator: Select an option to store the result as a single-value variable (is stored as) or add the result as a multiple-value variable (is appended to).
  • Target: Enter the name of the robotic process variable where you want to store or append the result. If your process variable is type CDT, you can specify which field of a CDT to store the result into using dot notation.

After completion

  • Wait before executing next action: Enter the number of seconds the robotic process waits before it continues to the next action in the workflow.
  • Take a screenshot: If you select this option, the robotic process takes a screenshot of the resource immediately after the action completes successfully.

Start process

The Start Process action lets you kick off a process in Appian as part of a robotic process. You can map variables from a process model in Appian to the robotic process variables you've defined in the configuration. The action passes data from Appian RPA variables to Appian using this map and initiates a process using the data as input.

Configuration

Click Edit to choose the process model to start:

  • Search for the process model to reference in the Process Model field. As you type, Appian suggests available process models to choose from. If you don't have access to the selected process model, you'll see a message saying it's not visible and you won't be able to load the process parameters.
  • Select a process model and the process parameters appear.

Output

  • Operator: Select an option to store the result as a single-value variable (is stored as) or add the result as a multiple-value variable (is appended to).
  • Target: Enter the name of the robotic process variable where you want to store or append the result. If your process variable is type CDT, you can specify which field of a CDT to store the result into using dot notation.

After completion

  • Wait before executing next action: Enter the number of seconds the robotic process waits before it continues to the next action in the workflow.
  • Take a screenshot: If you select this option, the robotic process takes a screenshot of the resource immediately after the action completes successfully.

Upload document

The Upload Document action lets you upload a file to Appian from the resource where the robotic process executes. If you want to use Appian RPA to extract and reconcile documents from a legacy system, this action helps you do it. You can use this action to save those documents to Appian, where you can use our document extraction suite to digitize and act on that information.

Configuration

This action contains the following configurations:

  • Upload Type: Choose whether you want the robotic process to Take a screenshot or Upload a file.
  • File Path: Lets you specify the full path of the file to upload. This field lets you enter a text string, choose a variable, or use the expression editor.
  • Document Name: Lets you specify the name of the document object to create in Appian. This field lets you enter a text string, choose a variable, or use the expression editor. If you leave this field blank, the original file name will be used as the document name.
  • Target Folder: Lets you specify the location in Appian to save the document. Enter a folder ID or use the expression editor to configure the target folder using a constant. You need to have at least Viewer access on the folder object to configure it as the target folder in this action. During execution, the robotic process will only be able to upload a document to folders where it has Author access.

Output

  • Operator: Select an option to store the result as a single-value variable (is stored as) or add the result as a multiple-value variable (is appended to).
  • Target: Enter the name of the robotic process variable where you want to store or append the result. If your process variable is type CDT, you can specify which field of a CDT to store the result into using dot notation.

After completion

  • Wait before executing next action: Enter the number of seconds the robotic process waits before it continues to the next action in the workflow.
  • Take a screenshot: If you select this option, the robotic process takes a screenshot of the resource immediately after the action completes successfully.

Download document

The Download Document action lets you download a file from Appian to the resource where the robotic process executes. This action is useful if your robotic process needs to upload files to other destinations or process the information on the desktop.

Uploading an Appian document to a web form? You can use the Interact with Element action to upload documents directly from Appian and skip the download step.

Configuration

This action contains the following configurations:

  • Appian Document: Choose the robotic process variable that maps to the document you want to download. You can also configure the value using the expression editor, using the todocument() function or using a constant.
  • File Name: Lets you specify the name you want to use for the downloaded file. This field lets you enter a text string, choose a variable, or use the expression editor. If you leave this field empty, the file will use the filename used in Appian.
  • Folder Path: Lets you specify the path where to download the file. This field lets you enter a text string, choose a variable, or use the expression editor.

Output

  • Operator: Select an option to store the result as a single-value variable (is stored as) or add the result as a multiple-value variable (is appended to).
  • Target: Enter the name of the robotic process variable where you want to store or append the result. If your process variable is type CDT, you can specify which field of a CDT to store the result into using dot notation.

After completion

  • Wait before executing next action: Enter the number of seconds the robotic process waits before it continues to the next action in the workflow.
  • Take a screenshot: If you select this option, the robotic process takes a screenshot of the resource immediately after the action completes successfully.
Open in Github Built: Wed, Aug 17, 2022 (01:05:05 PM)

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