Appian Services Actions

Overview

Appian Services actions extend robotic task automation capabilities within your Appian applications. Using these actions, your robotic task can automatically send data to or request data from Appian numerous times throughout the robotic task 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 task 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 task. In most cases, the robotic task 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 tasks, eliminating the need for additional credentials to be defined in the Appian RPA Console or referenced in the robotic task code.

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

This page describes how to use actions. If you need to extend Appian RPA capabilities, you can use Java to create workflow libraries for robotic tasks.

Using Appian Services actions

Appian Services actions are listed in the Appian Services area of the palette.

• Download document
• Evaluate expression
• Start process
• Upload document

Download document

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

Configuration

This action contains the following configurations:

• Appian Document: Choose the robotic task 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 task variable where you want to store or append the result. If your 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 task waits before it continues to the next action in the robotic task definition.
• Take a screenshot: If you select this option, the robotic task takes a screenshot of the host machine immediately after the action completes successfully.

Usage considerations

• When downloading documents, ensure their size does not exceed 200 MB.
• For optimal performance, it's essential to allocate a minimum of 1.75GB memory for the agent. To achieve this, create a configuration file that specifies this memory allocation. Please consult your system administrator for guidance on generating the appropriate config file.

Evaluate expression

The Evaluate expression action allows you to write and evaluate regular expressions and Appian expressions directly in your robotic task. This action provides an expression pane where you can call Appian expression rules (rule!) and constants (cons!), reference robotic task 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 task 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 task variable where you want to store or append the result. If your 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 task waits before it continues to the next action in the robotic task definition.
• Take a screenshot: If you select this option, the robotic task takes a screenshot of the host machine 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 task. You can map variables from a process model in Appian to the robotic task 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.

By default, the Start process action is asynchronous: it launches the process model and the robotic task immediately continues to the next action. To make the robotic task wait for the process model to finish before continuing, use the Wait for completion option described below.

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.

• Wait for completion: Choose whether the robotic task waits for the process model to finish before continuing.
  • No (default): The process model starts asynchronously and the robotic task continues to the next action immediately.
  • Yes: The robotic task pauses and waits for the invoked process model to finish—whether completed or errored—before resuming the next action. When Wait for completion is set to Yes, choose how long the robotic task waits:
    • By default, this field is set to wait up to 120 seconds.
    • Select a custom timeout to wait up to 10 minutes (600 seconds).

Output

When the process model ends or when the wait expires, the Start process action surfaces a success, failure, or timeout status. Wait for completion mode returns completion status only.

• 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 task variable where you want to store or append the result. If your 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 task waits before it continues to the next action in the robotic task definition.
• Take a screenshot: If you select this option, the robotic task takes a screenshot of the host machine immediately after the action completes successfully.

Usage considerations when using Wait for completion

• While the robotic task waits for the process model to complete, the robotic task stays in a running state and holds its active application session. Any reserved credentials are held for the duration of the wait.
• Ensure that the target process model permissions grant Viewer access to the robotic task initiator. Without at least Viewer permission, the action will fail.
• Wait for completion is not recommended for a long-running or human-interactive process model, such as those with user input tasks.

Upload document

The Upload Document action lets you upload a file to Appian from the host machine where the robotic task 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 task 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 task 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 task variable where you want to store or append the result. If your 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 task waits before it continues to the next action in the robotic task definition.
• Take a screenshot: If you select this option, the robotic task takes a screenshot of the host machine immediately after the action completes successfully.

Usage consideration

When uploading documents, ensure their size does not exceed 200 MB.

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