FlowPath

Team - Santhosh Selvam , Dinesh Balasubramanian , Suresh Subbarayalu

Inspiration

UiPath is the most popular RPA software in the market. On the other hand, MS flow is the most popular cloud based automation tool with a tight integration with the Office applications and more than 250 external connectors like LUIS, Azure, Computer vision, Ethereum, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Bitbucket, JIRA etc.

Deep integration between these two powerful platforms will open up numerous opportunities to automate the processes and eliminate some of the existing limitations. A custom connector is built for UiPath to integrate with MS Flow platform. Both are widely used in the enterprises to achieve automation goals. This integration will ensure a proper connection to bridge the gaps, push the limits and improvise the automations.

What it does

Orchestrator API and Webhooks are combined with the MS flow custom connector creation to define and develop triggers and actions in accordance with the Custom Connector framework. The New Uipath cloud and API authentication mechanism are used to build the connector.

UiPath Triggers added to MS Flow

When a Job completes successfully
When a Job fails
when a new item added to queue

Actions added to MS Flow

Start a Job
Add a Queue item
Get all Releases
Get all Processes
Get Job status

Wiki

Technical possibilities

Execute UiPath robots based on diverse amount of triggers available with MS flow (inbuilt, custom and third party). Examples - Triggers from SharePoint, Outlook, Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, JIRA, Salesforce, Workday, MS Kaizala, Azure, Slack....
Execute workflows on MS flow platform with triggers from UiPath. Example - Run a skype flow to notify the stakeholders on successful UiPath job completion. Orchestrator webhooks are configured in MS flow to build a custom connector for UiPath
Train the models built in with AI builder and use the processed data in UiPath jobs
Connect with AI services like LUIS, Face API, computer vision with the UiPath workflows thru MS flow
Build PowerApps for Mobile and web to provide a easy user interface to the users to run/monitor the automations
Build Microservices combining MS Flow with UiPath using HTTP request feature of MS Flow

Use Cases

Run Uipath job on a file is added or modified to sharepoint, Google drive, OneDrive..
Run Uipath job on arrival of particular emails (Invoices, Reports...)
Process Invoices/Receipt thru trained models in AI builder and execute UiPath jobs with the extracted data
Execute other onboarding processes when a new employee is added to workday
On any uipath event (job completion, failure etc..) get notified thru skype, MS teams, Slack, SMS, mobile push notifications...
Create and process Surveys
Setup Approval flows

References

How we built it

FlowPath connector is built using the Custom Connector option for Microsoft flow to interact with UiPath. Orchestrator REST APIs and Webhooks are the base for building the connector. We built the connector swagger from scratch to test each option and define the necessary parameters

Each trigger and action is a http call with the necessary request parameters and the response schema is defined as per the specifications provided UiPath.

Challenges we ran into

Several challenges were faced in building this connector like

Authentication mechanism for the community edition is revamped recently and the new one was very hard to integrate with Flow
Defining the UiPath outbound webhooks as Triggers in Flow was a big challenge because of the thin documentation by Flow in this area

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Introducing a huge set of triggers to execute UiPath jobs/actions
Extending the connector ecosystem of MS flow to UiPath which benefits both the applications
Finding an alternative approach to the revamped cloud api authentication which took too much to break