An approach to exception handling in BluePrism

One of the things I dislike the most is the fact that when someone approaches RPA is lead to think that he/she doesn’t need any, programming language knowledge: sadly it’s not true.
The proof of that is the poor exception handling I often see: we know from traditional programming that is better to handle exceptions at the higher level and in BP is exactly the same.
Before we have to distinguish between technical and business exception:

• Technical exceptions are the most common ones and related to temporary application problems (or bad programming). Could be handled locally using the exception block because of these exceptions can be solved simply re-trying a specific part of the process raising the exception only if max number of tentatives is reached;

• Business exceptions are related to the process logic and most of the times it means that you cannot work the item in the queue, or maybe you just have to skip that particular process step 

Because of when we talk about RPA, we are mainly talking about workflows, if something falls apart the logic we designed most of the time the result will be that the item could not be worked, so there is no reason not to manage them on the main page.
Consider we are always dealing with the producer-consumer model (if you don’t know what I’m talking about read this blog post first ) so in the image below I just added a piece in the producer-consumer model by defining exception types and recognizing it in the main page in order to what is needed according to the exception type.

Exception handling to the higher level

After that, the robot will pick another item from the queue and start working again. Thanks to Antonio Durante for the useful brainstorming sessions which lead us to define new standards