Hi everyone,
I have to set up a process that is always run, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The process is based on receiving emails that are sent to the starting node, I don't know exactly when they are sent and above all the cadence of the process is random: even hundreds of emails per minute can be sent at the end of the day or at regular intervals.
How do you set the timer trigger for this case?
p.s: i don't have the license to integrate Appian with RPA
Thank you all.
Discussion posts and replies are publicly visible
@albertob5031 - As I understand, the process needs to trigger if mail receive? If yes, in the start node we can create a trigger a receive a message and configure the event as mail.(Also in the properties of process model set the public events check box as enable if anyone can trigger the process). Please confirm its helps you based on my understanding.
Thanks,
Pradeep Sridharan
yes that correct sir, i've set up the process model like this, so have i to include the received message into the start node configured as a trigger?
Sorry, I was incorrect - it appears you already do have the "public events" option selected. Are you saying that sending an email to the process doesn't successfully start it? Can you share details of what you've tried for this? Starting processes via email is not something I have too much experience with, though I do know it's supposed to be a supported use case.
Also note there may be some additional setup steps needed:
Also, what email address are you using? It doesn't seem to be made very clear in the documentation, but the format needs to be specific - "processmodel<process model id>@yourserver" - i.e. `processmodel1234@myProject.appiancloud.com` etc. I just tested this setup in one of my environments and it worked immediately (though I assume the necessary mail server setup detailed in my last reply was done a long time ago).
no sir, the emails are coming correctly, but it seems that the user "anonimous" (which is that one that Appian identifies as the user that send the email) doesn't have the right permission to perform some operations like write do data store entity in this case. I attach the error appeared and the flow process here
yes, it's the same format as mine, i don't have any problem for the reception of the emails, but for the other plug-ins in the process model with some permission as write/read, that still don't work
You will likely need to set those nodes to "Run as whoever designed the process model" - see the documentation for unattended activites: https://docs.appian.com/suite/help/latest/Process_Node_and_Smart_Service_Properties.html#unattended-activities
This is generally a good practice, but it will ensure that these nodes are run as the last person to publish the process model, and that user will usually have the appropriate level of security.
albertob5031 said:it seems that the user "anonimous" (which is that one that Appian identifies as the user that send the email) doesn't have the right permission to perform some operations like write do data store entity
Previously you'd just said "it doesn't work" - this is considerably different from "the process model is started but it fails on a particular node", because otherwise I was led to assume the email wasn't even causing the process to start. To solve this issue, as Peter said already, you'll merely need to have those nodes execute as "designer". Another common way to handle this (to avoid having to manually set a bunch of different nodes like this) is to have the email target a wrapper process, which shortly after it's started, calls your normal process as a subprocess (also under the "as designer" assignment).
Or the whole PM in a swimlane configured for all nodes inside it to "Run as whoever designed this Process Model". That setting is key to getting lots of things to work in Appian, almost to the point of saying you should ALWAYS set it that way unless you have very good reason not to.
BTW, you'll want to make sure you import deployments on Production as someone with all the permissions ever, and who is configured by system admin and is not a real person, and won't ever leave, such as a "Process Designer" make-believe account. If you make a real person the guy who installs everything, and he or she leaves, then when you deactivate that user suddenly you deactivate about everything your system does. I was on a project where they did that by accident. That was an interesting day.
Dave Lewis said: someone with all the permissions ever, and who is configured by system admin and is not a real person, and won't ever leave, such as a "Process Designer" make-believe account.
Luckily these days this is pretty easy to do with automated deployment, set up to use an Admin user who's dedicated as a Service Account. 5 or 6 years ago before they had any of these features, we had to do deployments as one of the developers, then run a process that looped through every process model and ran the "republish as user" node (for every PM requiring it) to republish them under an internal account. In that case, we had a 100% PIV-card-login requirement by the customer's "security department", so we couldn't just login as a special user at import time. Needless to say, it was very satisfying when I could finally set up that environment for automated imports under a service account.
Thank you all guys, i'll check it later all your suggestions