The much awaited SAP Intelligent RPA is finally out now. Being a core ABAP developer and someone who has explored and developed SAP related automation bots using other RPA tools, I was keen to know how different IRPA is when compared to them.
The major difference that I observed is on the UI of IRPA. SAP's IRPA is based on Javascript technology and it definitely has got a learning curve to begin with the tool. There are Open SAP courses intended to help you on this, but that is definitely not enough. The SAP community is the biggest Savior over here, with a bunch of good articles. I setup IRPA in my system following instructions from the SCN blog of Vijay Sharma. The studio, agent and cloud factory setup, where mainly done based on the inputs from Open SAP course and various blogs in the SAP community. Here I will be sharing, some of the strange issues I have encountered and how I was able to resolve them. Hope this will help others as well who might come across the same issues. We will start with the very basic ones.
Java not installed in the system
If you installed IRPA Desktop studio in the system without having JRE, you will have to set Java_Home variable manually in the environment variables
JRE_HOME and JAVA_HOME can be the same. In my case, I had a separate Java installation, hence its different.
Package developed not showing up in the Agent Panel
I encountered this issue several times. Even though the BOT is built, the workflow was not being shown up in the Desktop Agent. To solve this we will have to adjust the global script little bit. In the script editor view, go to method GLOBAL.events.START.on method and comment the if condition for ctx.options.isDebug statement
Desktop Agent can't be started as another instance of Desktop Agent is executing
Once you are done with the BOT development and want to execute it, you might get another error. The agent can't be started because another instance of agent is already running. Even stopping the process from task manager is not helping. For resolving this you need to open the task manager, go to services tab, click on Open Services link on the bottom of window and then find the service named SAP Intelligent RPA Desktop Service, double click on it and change the Startup type to Manual from Automatic. Once the change is made you can stop the desktop Agent process and retry executing the BOT. If it is still not working a system reboot will definitely solve the issue.
Scheduled Trigger not working or Agent shows as disconnected in RPA Factory
This will happen mainly if you had made the Service start up type to manual in last step. For the scheduled trigger to work, you just need to do the reverse. Goto services tab in task manager, click open services, double click on SAP Intelligent RPA Desktop Service, change the start up mode to Automatic and then reboot the service.
The purpose of this post was to address the most common issues that a new developer of SAP IRPA might encounter and where the fixes are not readily available. RPA is one of the hot technologies in the market and almost all enterprises will have at least one scenario that needs an ERP automation. With built in support to interact with SAP GUI and UI5 applications along with its pricing model, SAP IRPA has got all chances to fly.
The major difference that I observed is on the UI of IRPA. SAP's IRPA is based on Javascript technology and it definitely has got a learning curve to begin with the tool. There are Open SAP courses intended to help you on this, but that is definitely not enough. The SAP community is the biggest Savior over here, with a bunch of good articles. I setup IRPA in my system following instructions from the SCN blog of Vijay Sharma. The studio, agent and cloud factory setup, where mainly done based on the inputs from Open SAP course and various blogs in the SAP community. Here I will be sharing, some of the strange issues I have encountered and how I was able to resolve them. Hope this will help others as well who might come across the same issues. We will start with the very basic ones.
Java not installed in the system
If you installed IRPA Desktop studio in the system without having JRE, you will have to set Java_Home variable manually in the environment variables
JRE_HOME and JAVA_HOME can be the same. In my case, I had a separate Java installation, hence its different.
Package developed not showing up in the Agent Panel
I encountered this issue several times. Even though the BOT is built, the workflow was not being shown up in the Desktop Agent. To solve this we will have to adjust the global script little bit. In the script editor view, go to method GLOBAL.events.START.on method and comment the if condition for ctx.options.isDebug statement
Desktop Agent can't be started as another instance of Desktop Agent is executing
Once you are done with the BOT development and want to execute it, you might get another error. The agent can't be started because another instance of agent is already running. Even stopping the process from task manager is not helping. For resolving this you need to open the task manager, go to services tab, click on Open Services link on the bottom of window and then find the service named SAP Intelligent RPA Desktop Service, double click on it and change the Startup type to Manual from Automatic. Once the change is made you can stop the desktop Agent process and retry executing the BOT. If it is still not working a system reboot will definitely solve the issue.
Scheduled Trigger not working or Agent shows as disconnected in RPA Factory
This will happen mainly if you had made the Service start up type to manual in last step. For the scheduled trigger to work, you just need to do the reverse. Goto services tab in task manager, click open services, double click on SAP Intelligent RPA Desktop Service, change the start up mode to Automatic and then reboot the service.
The purpose of this post was to address the most common issues that a new developer of SAP IRPA might encounter and where the fixes are not readily available. RPA is one of the hot technologies in the market and almost all enterprises will have at least one scenario that needs an ERP automation. With built in support to interact with SAP GUI and UI5 applications along with its pricing model, SAP IRPA has got all chances to fly.
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