Appian RPA - How to Send Notifications When "Open Browser" Fails?

Certified Senior Developer

Hi,

I'm using the Open Browser action in Appian RPA to launch a legacy web application. Occasionally, the website may be down, and when that happens, the bot execution fails with an error like "unable to navigate to URL."

In such cases, I would like to trigger a notification (ideally an email) to inform the support team immediately about the failure.

My questions are:

  1. Is there any default mechanism in Appian RPA to send notifications (like emails) on task failures?

  2. If not, what’s the best practice to implement an email notification when an action like Open Browser fails?

Any guidance or examples would be appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

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  • 0
    Certified Lead Developer

    You can try to set a timeout time in seconds or web browser related condition actions within the robotic task along with Open Browser action. When the website is down, before bot failure, you can catch the exception/issue and then start an Appian process from within the robotic task that can send out the notification email. 

    I have not worked on this use case myself so you can give this a try and let me know if it works. 

  • 0
    Certified Senior Developer
    in reply to Harsha Sharma

    Hi Harsha,

    Thanks for the response!

    I also explored using browser conditions, thinking I could add a check and trigger a process if the condition fails. However, I noticed that browser conditions only evaluate after the page is successfully loaded. In my case, the bot fails while loading the page itself, throwing an error like "unable to navigate to URL," so the condition never gets evaluated.

    To handle this, I tried triggering the bot from a process model and attempted to catch the error using the Execute Robotic Task smart service. I found the FailureSection output, which indicates whether the error occurred in the Setup, Main, or Cleanup section. However, it doesn’t give detailed error context or allow direct handling of the error itself.

    Is there any other way to catch exceptions or handle bot execution failures from the process model or within the robotic task to trigger a custom email alert?

    Any suggestions would be really helpful!

  • +1
    Certified Lead Developer
    in reply to sanmathis

    I found a documentation : https://docs.appian.com/suite/help/25.2/rpa-9.16/design-patterns.html#handling-unplanned-exceptions Basis this I can suggest you the below 

    I tried triggering the bot from a process model a

    While triggering from process model, keep a boolean botExecutionResult variable in process model that stores false initially. Now you can use this variable to trigger additional workflows from the process model. 

    If Execution is successful then in the Execute Robotic  Task output should  save true in the botExecutionResult  variable. In case of bot execution failure that you are seeing in your case, you can have an additional  path to handle exception in the same process model using rule event to trigger the process to send email. 

    Rule event can be configured by selecting a time say 1 hour from initial process start time. If you feel the process could take longer to complete add some more buffer hours. Idea is if the bot execution fails now then in one hour also it will be failed so using the rule event you can initiate another path that will trigger the email notification process. 

    Below is a sample rule event configuration code 

    and(a!addDateTime(startDateTime: pp!starttime,hours:1)=now(),pv!botExecutionResult  =false())

Reply
  • +1
    Certified Lead Developer
    in reply to sanmathis

    I found a documentation : https://docs.appian.com/suite/help/25.2/rpa-9.16/design-patterns.html#handling-unplanned-exceptions Basis this I can suggest you the below 

    I tried triggering the bot from a process model a

    While triggering from process model, keep a boolean botExecutionResult variable in process model that stores false initially. Now you can use this variable to trigger additional workflows from the process model. 

    If Execution is successful then in the Execute Robotic  Task output should  save true in the botExecutionResult  variable. In case of bot execution failure that you are seeing in your case, you can have an additional  path to handle exception in the same process model using rule event to trigger the process to send email. 

    Rule event can be configured by selecting a time say 1 hour from initial process start time. If you feel the process could take longer to complete add some more buffer hours. Idea is if the bot execution fails now then in one hour also it will be failed so using the rule event you can initiate another path that will trigger the email notification process. 

    Below is a sample rule event configuration code 

    and(a!addDateTime(startDateTime: pp!starttime,hours:1)=now(),pv!botExecutionResult  =false())

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