Validating and updating bots after migration

Migrated bots are uploaded to the public repository of the Automation 360 Control Room (in the same folder containing the equivalent .atmx files). You can review the current status of the migrated bots and any errors encountered due to unsupported commands or attributes available in those bots from the Migration List page.

It is important that you review, test, and verify all migrated bots to ensure that they run successfully in the Automation 360 environment.

The migration assistant is merged with the error assistant to provide a comprehensive view of all the lines in a bot that require review or action by you, or which have errors in these and therefore require you to address them. This feature helps you to quickly identify the areas of bots that require your attention. Before testing any bot, scroll through the entire migrated bot from the first to last line so that the Migration Assistant flags any issues.

If you do not review the entire bot, you might see a failed to compile error.

Updating your bots

If a bot requires any modifications based on the migration reports or testing phase, you can edit the bot:
  1. Check out the bot from the public repository into a private repository.
  2. Use the Migration Assistant to view changes to migrated bots.

    The Migration Assistant will guide you for any required changes and provide opportunities to leverage new Automation 360 features.

  3. Edit the bot in the Bot editor if required.

    You can run the bot directly from the Bot editor as you modify your bot and test the process steps.

Perform these steps in your Development (DEV) environment. After the migrated bots clear your preset pass criteria, move them to the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) environment to test the bots against production-like systems with larger datasets.

Only when the bot clears the UAT requirements should you deploy it in a Production (PROD) environment. This process is part of the typical industry standard software development lifecycle (SDLC) best practices.

Moving bots using Bot Lifecycle Management

Use Bot Lifecycle Management to move bots from one environment to another. After you have tested and successfully run the migrated bots in the development (DEV) environment, you can use Bot Lifecycle Management to move the bots from the development environment to the UAT environment. Similarly, you use Bot Lifecycle Management to move the bots from the UAT production (PROD) environment.

When you move bots, if the following error occurs "Can't create directory: <directory name>", see Unable to import or export the bots from v11 to Automation 360 (A-People login required).

Bot compatibility version

After migration, if you remove the AAApplicationPath from the destination path and the bot compatibility version is set to 1, the bot deployment fails. This occurs because in version 1 the file path is parsed during compilation time. Depending on the Control Room device (Linux or Windows), the file or folder paths might differ causing an error when this path is parsed during bot compilation time.

Recommendation: Change the bot compatibility version to 2. In this version, the file path is parsed during bot runtime depending on the device on which the bot runs.

When you migrate the bots from Enterprise 11 to Automation 360, the bots have a default bot compatibility version of 1. If you change the bot compatibility version from 1 to any other version (such as 2, 3, or 4) and your bot or file path contains a combination of forward and backward slashes, the bot execution fails with an error to verify the path.

Consider the following scenarios to understand how changing the bot compatibility version affects the migrated bots.

Scenario 1:
  • Bot compatibility version: Retained as 1
  • Input path: c:\test/foo.pdf
  • Path during compilation: Remains the same as input path, that is c:\test/foo.pdf
  • Result: Bot executes successfully
Scenario 2:
  • Bot compatibility version: Changed to 2, 3, or 4
  • Input path: c:\test/foo.pdf
  • Path during compilation: Modified to c:\test\foo.pdf
  • Result: Bot execution fails

You can either retain the bot compatibility version as 1 for the migrated bots or change the bot or file path for those bots containing a combination of forward and backward slashes in their path.

See the following video on how to validate changes made to migrated bots: