Understanding the Concept of Workflow of UiPath

During the bot development, it is important to understand how you will implement the workflow and which activity should be used to model it. UiPath offers the following four activities for implementing a workflow:

• Flow chart
• Sequence
• State Machine
• Global Exception Handler

These workflows can be thought of as parent containers and can include other child activities, each of these activities differs in terms of execution sequence and execution paths. Each activity is designed to implement a specific workflow and a brief description of each of the activities is as follows:

Sequence

This is the most commonly used activity and is best suited to model automation that has a defined progression in the workflow, from one step to the next. So, there is a linear progression from one step to another within a sequence.

As an example, if you are automating a workflow to scrap data from a website, you will follow all the steps in a predefined sequence: Open a browser with a specific URL, open an excel file to read the information on all the categories to be crawled, loop through the categories one by one, grab elements from the product list and product details from within each activity, and keep appending this information in the targeted excel file or any other destination. So, these steps progress in a sequential manner.

Flow Chart

This activity can be used to implement conditional workflows that may switch between the two different paths depending on the result of evaluating the condition. Think of it as an if-else condition in your implementation. Flow chart uses Flow decision to define decision points, with two paths based on the condition evaluation that may be true or false.

It differs from the previous activity in terms of switching. In addition to this, you can use a Flow switch that acts as a switch case statement, with one outcome for each match.

State Machine

The state machine can be thought of as a superset of the Flow chart. While the flow chart provides branching and workflow only in 2 directions, the state machine can be thought of as a way to implement a workflow based on multiple conditions. Overall logic can be thought of as composed of states with transitions from one state into another state. This activity thus simplifies the implementation of complex transactional business processes.

Global Exception Handler

This activity is the core of implementing error handling in your automation projects. Think of it as a global exception handler as the component that allows you to handle different error conditions in the automation project. So, whenever an exception occurs during the execution, it redirects to the global exception handler workflow.

If you need to create a robust solution, it is critically important to think of all the error conditions and system behavior for all the error conditions. While technology does not eliminate the thought process, yet it simplifies exception handling by it globally.

This workflow adds all required activities, variables, and arguments as a template. So, the global handler gives the ability to setup application behavior in case of an error condition, and choose to either abort the program, ignore the exception and continue execution, retry the activity that threw an exception or continue to run the global exception handler workflow.