Introduction

Actions Separated From Orchestrator

The Actions tab in Orchestrator has been dropped starting with the 2021.10 release.

Now, you can work with Actions outside Orchestrator, through Action Center. Check out the topics below, to find out more about the capabilities of Action Center:

• An overview on Action Center
• Behavior
• Prerequisites
• Benefits.

Overview

Action Center offers a way for business users to handle actionable items and provide business inputs to Robots. It enables support for long-running unattended workflows that require human intervention as workflow execution is fragmented and can be suspended and resumed at a later time after human input is provided.

There are two facets of Actions Center:

• Processes—Enable users to launch unattended processes.

• Actions—Enable users to provide inputs to Robots, which are later on used to successfully complete the workflow execution.

  Important: Action Center is a licensed feature, you are legally bound to procure licenses before granting access to users.

Behavior

A long-running workflow in which human validation is required is configured in Studio using the Orchestration Process template and specific activities.

Such a workflow generates actions to be acted upon by users on the Action Center website. After an action is human-handled, the execution is routed back to the process, as marked in the workflow by the corresponding activity, and gets executed on an available UiPath Robot. In the context of long-running business processes, this allows for better resource allocation and reduced execution downtime, especially since the fragments of the jobs can be executed by any available Robot.

Once an action is generated in Orchestrator, it is displayed on the Actions page with the status Unassigned. Attributes like priority, title, or catalog are populated based on how the action was customized in Studio using the corresponding activity.

Actions are grouped according to user-defined criteria in Action Catalogs that need to be defined in Orchestrator first and then set at action creation in Studio, using the same activity mentioned above.

Sample process

Say you have an invoice-processing workflow. A user with execution permissions starts a job for the corresponding process.

The job is executed as usually, up until it encounters the activity which suspends it. That's when human intervention is required.

In Automation Cloud, an activity is generated awaiting completion. An action admin who handles the actions inbox, further assigns the item to a specialized user. The user gets notified that an action is pending.

After the action has been validated, the job is resumed and the execution is finished by any Robot that is available.

Since fragments of the same job can be executed by different Robots, the corresponding logs target the entire job progress, providing a summary of the execution beginning with Robots, human-reviewer, and the triggers the job is waiting on.

Prerequisites

In order to build and execute long-running workflows, the following Studio, UiPath Robot, and UiPath.Persistence.Activities requirements must be met:

Software	Version
UiPath Studio/UiPath Robot	2019.10+
UiPath.Persistence.Activities package	1.1.7+
UiPath Orchestrator	2021.10.0+

Important:

Authenticating your Robot using Secure Authentication requires recompilation of workflows that use Orchestrator activities or make direct HTTP calls to the Orchestrator API utilizing v2020.10 activity packages or higher.

There is a chance job execution will fail if you use UiPath.Persistence.Activities versions lower than v1.1.7.

Benefits

Important: If you are currently using Action Center within Orchestrator (the Actions tab), consider moving to the on-premises Action Center, as the Actions tab in Orchestrator has been dropped starting with the 2021.10 release.

Here are some features of the on-premises Action Center that you can benefit from:

• Separate installation on the same server as Orchestrator or on a different one.
  Warning:

  • Although installed separately, Action Center requires a connection to an Orchestrator instance.
  • One Action Center (single node or multi-node supported setup) can be connected to one Orchestrator, either a production or a non-production environment. To connect to more Orchestrator environments, you need to run an equal number of different Action Center installations.

• Business user interface, with quick outside-Orchestrator access to Actions and Processes. All the existing actions will be automatically reflected in the new UI.
• Ability for business users to trigger unattended processes through forms or file uploads, and track the process status.
• Advanced controls in Form Actions, such as embedding PDF files, dynamic and cascaded drop-downs, or configuring form validation logic using JavaScript.
• Ability to add any file attachments to actions.
• Action summary.
• Actions overview.
• More operations available on Actions, such as forwarding or reassigning.
• Intermediate Save, allowing you to save the progress made on a form before completion.
• Peer collaboration on actions through the Comments panel.
• Bulk actions management (assignments, deletions, forwarding).
• Downloadable action lists, containing details such as action creation time, title, status, the assigned user, etc.
• Improved filtering and sorting options.