With Workload management, you can quickly process vast amounts of transactions by distributing the workload among multiple devices in the device pool.

Let’s say you have created a queue, a device pool and scheduled a bot to run when a specified minimum number of work items are added to the queue. While the transactions are being processed, you may notice that there are a couple of work items that have failed and want to know how to re-process these transactions.

Let us look at the steps to fix the data (if needed) and re-process these transactions.

In this Invoice Processing example, data from invoices in a specified folder are extracted using IQ Bot and fed into custom web application for payments processing.

Here is the breakdown of the two-part bot setup to execute the Invoice processing use case.

As you can see in the diagram above, the second bot picks up the Invoice files from the path added to the Queue by the first bot.

Let’s consider an error that a work item failed since the specific file is missing in the path mentioned. Now, let us fix this and set it to re-process.

Select the queue connected to the bot, that is ‘FilePathQueue’, and click on the Queue Name.

Edit queue screen displays next which displays all the work items along with their status such as Completed, Failed , Ready to Run etc., In this list, consider the failed work item id 472. You can see the details of the error by clicking on the 3 dots on the right side of the transaction and Clicking on the View icon.

Here is the View icon for your reference.

In the View Work item screen, you can see the details related to the work item along with the error details. In this example, the file does not exist in the location mentioned.

There can be two ways to fix this issue, first is to check if the mentioned location has that specific file. If not, place the file in this location or second option is to update the correct location which contains the specified file. Let us assume we want to update the file location. Click the button ‘Edit’ on the top right corner and update the file location in the FilePath field.

Once the file location is updated, add a comment for Audit log purpose and now select the Status as Re-process and Click Save Changes. Now the transaction will be reprocessed, and if it goes fine, it will have an updated status as Completed as shown below.

In this example, we updated the file location, however sometimes you may notice that there are no changes needed, and just needs the work item to be re-processed. In this case, select the work item and click the button ‘Re-process’ in the ‘Edit Queue’ screen. You can either select just one work item or multiple work items at once to be reprocessed.

Apart from Re-processing the work item, you can also choose to Delete, Mark Complete or Put On hold based on your analysis of each of the work items that have failed.

Conclusion:

WorkLoad Management is a powerful way to process hundreds and thousands of transactions by distributing the transactions across multiple devices in a device pool. As you will be dealing with huge list of work items, it's important to understand, how to analyze failed work items and take necessary actions based on your analysis.

To know more about Workload management and how to use it, please take a look at the meetup recording on the same topic.