Automation invocation for Pega Platform
Cases in the Pega Platform™ can call automations to help complete manual steps in the workflow. Recall the two types of automation architectures are attended and unattended, which specify whether human supervision is necessary to complete automated tasks. Invoking automations from the Pega Platform is most commonly performed by:
- A flow action
- A robot queue
- A data page
A flow action
A flow action within a case type calls attended automations to run either before or after completing the task. In Pega Platform, a flow action controls how users interact with user forms to complete assignments. The following image shows a flow action within a flow for a case where a Pega Platform application uses an automation to requests a user’s information.
The flow action can specify whether the automation executes as a:
- Pre-processing event – Typically used to retrieve any required data from applications to display to an end-user to complete the step.
- Post-processing events – Typically used to add, update, or remove data to applications once an end-user completes the step.
For more information on how pre-processing and post-processing actions work in the Pega Platform, see Flow action integration. The following image shows possible pre-processing and post-processing actions on a flow action.
Use the Run robotic automation field to specify the automation in Pega Robot Studio.
A robot queue
Use a robot queue in a case workflow to invoke an unattended automation. When a case workflow assigns work to a robot queue, one or more robots that subscribe to the queue perform the following tasks by polling for work at regular intervals.
The robot:
- Retrieves the assignment from the queue
- Obtains the case data associated with the assignment
- Performs the specified automation task
- Sends the updated data, the assignment, or confirmation back to the case
- Retrieves the next assignment to process.
The following image shows a case that contains a robot queue step in the second stage.
The Process credit report step assigns work to a designated robotic work queue in Pega Robot Manager and specifies the automation that does the work. In the case step, specify the appropriate work queue in the Route to queue field, and in the Run robotic automation field, enter the automation name.
Note: For more information on Robot Manager work queues, see Creating robotic work groups, assignment types and case types.
A data page
Data pages are tools that source on-demand data for Pega Platform applications. Data pages can call both attended automations that run locally or unattended automations through a robot queue. For example, you can configure your automation to pull the customer FICO score from another application. The automation loads the score onto the data page and then populates fields in the Pega Customer Service™ application. The following images display a UI field based on a property that is referencing the Data_CustomerCreditProfile data page. This data page sources its information by calling an automation that retrieves a FICO score.
In the following image, click the + icons to learn more about the configuration necessary for the credit score example’s data page.
Note: Data pages have a default timeout value of sixty seconds. The default timeout value is configurable, which incorporates sufficient time for the robot to complete the work and return data to the data page. For attended automations, consider the user experience before extending the timeout value. Automations that take longer than 60 seconds may be best implemented as unattended.
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