Using Rules

Process for Using Rules

There are three high-level steps for using rules. These are (1) Generating Rule Opportunities, (2) Analyzing Rules, (3) Configuring Rules. These are described below:

1. Step1: Generate Rule Opportunities. Rules generation parses your imported RPA code and surfaces opportunities for each rule category. For example, every custom action Blueprint detects, or every unresolved reference found during generation. Even if you don't configure any of these rules, the lists are useful for planning and estimating a migration.
   You can generate rules from either the Rules Table or the Rules Wizard. To generate from the Rules Table:
   1. Click the Advanced dropdown in the top right, then select one of:
      1. Generate Project Rules - Generates rules for a selected folder or subfolder within your current scope.
      2. Generate Rules (Bulk) - Generates rules across multiple Blueprint projects in their entirety.
   2. In the modal that opens, configure the two additional settings at the bottom:
      1. Instance Scope - When enabled, generated rules apply to all exports across your instance. When disabled, rules are scoped to the current project only.
      2. Calltrees with Mains Only - Limits rule generation to call trees that include a Main process.
2. Step2: Analyze Rules. Generated Rule Opportunities are disabled by default. You need to analyze and decide which ones - if any - you'd like to configure and enable for use during export.
   Rules with many occurrences are usually worth configuring, because the effort to set up the rule can be much less than fixing each occurrence by hand in PAD.
   For example, say Blueprint reports a custom action used 1,000 times. If you don't configure a rule for it, your PAD flow will have 1,000 "TODO" comments, each of which you'll need to fix manually. Configuring the rule once and applying it during export resolves all 1,000 automatically. On the other hand, if a custom action is used only once, it's faster to fix it directly in PAD than to configure a rule.
   You're able to analyze rules using the Rules Table (see description below).
3. Step3: Configure Rules. Once you've decided which rules to use, configure each one and enable it for export. Each rule type behaves differently and requires specific information to work. See the table below for details.

User Interfaces in the Process

As described in the Introduction to Rules article the three Rules User Interfaces offer different capabilities. The table below summarizes what is possible for each step in each of the User Interfaces.

Rule Types

Different rule types are used to resolve the various cases where Blueprint is unable to convert. These are summarized in the table below.

For each it is also indicated whether Blueprint is able to automatically find and list rules within the source RPA code for each rule type and RPA tool ("Auto-generated").