Since the beginning of 2018 there has been an extensive list of new functionality added to the Pega Robotics product.  Adoption of new functionality is an integral part of product development.  As such, we will discuss this exciting new functionality in the product to create better awareness and stimulate adoption.   This “Ask The Expert” session is intended to answer questions, discuss use cases and to share your experiences with this new functionality .  Here is a list of the new functionality for this discussion:

In addition, we will be happy to include discussions concerning StringUtils, DateTimeUtils and TimeSpanUtils. 

Good morning!

I'd like to know if it is possible to work with complex JSON objects using JsonUtils. I know developer can set keys in component properties and use GetValueFromJSON or GetValueFromJSONByKeys. It works perfectly with simple key-value structure like this one:

  {
    "postId": 1,
    "id": 1,
    "name": "id labore ex et quam laborum",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "body": "laudantium enim quasi est quidem magnam voluptate ipsam eos\ntempora quo necessitatibus\ndolor quam autem quasi\nreiciendis et nam sapiente accusantium"
  }

There are also DeserializeObject(...) methods where I can provide object type. However, it doesn't seem easy to work with custom types there. 

Example: here is test JSON response which is JSON array containing multiple objects as above: https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/comments?postId=1

In C# I would add custom type:

    public class Comment
    {
        public string postId { get; set; }
        public string id { get; set; }
        public string name { get; set; }
        public string email { get; set; }
        public string body { get; set; }
    }

and then deserialized like this (using Newtonsoft.Json;):

List<Comment> comments = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<List<Comment>>(jsonString);

Could you show how would you do this with JsonUtils?

Thank you!

Complex json may be converted using JsonUtils to many different formats.  Converting to generic types such as List<string> is not currently supported.  There are other alternatives that will give you the same result, however.  In this case I would create a LookupTable that used "id" as the key and had a column for each of your other properties.

You can then use JsonUtils.DeserializeObject to create a data table from your json like this and store the result in your lookup table.  From there you would do normal processing.

I have attached a sample solution that contains all of this code.  In addition this sample shows how to return the lookup table as json after you have modified it.

The FileUtils component was released in build 8.0.1078.  It makes it easier to do basic file operations that are available through the File, Directory and Path objects in System.IO.

Here are the methods available:

One use case that I use often is to load a lookup table from a file that is included in the deployment package.  To generate the file I load the table using a  simple interface and then use the DataTable.WriteXml method to save it to disk. 

I then include the file in my solution.  When the solution starts I get a proxy for the data table, then find where the file is located on the disk using FileUtils  and finally load the lookup table.

The Excel File Connector is new in Pega Robotics version 8.0 SP1_2007. It is a connector that allows interaction with Excel without requiring Excel to be installed. This is most useful for RPA projects where you might not want to install Office or where you want to automate some Excel tasks without showing the file to a user. It is faster than the traditional Excel connector, however it doesn’t visually open the file, so you cannot watch what is happening. There are many methods available on the connector. You’ll also see similar ones added to the current connector in an upcoming release.

The attached solution showcases some common usage of the DateTimeUtils (to get today’s date and format it), the StringUtils (for checking whether or not a string is null or empty), and the FileUtils (to check to see if a file exists). It is essentially using an Excel file to store a list of orders processed for the day.

In the solution, you will first select a directory to store the file by clicking the “Select File Location” button. Next, you’ll need to click “Create File” which will create a new file in that directory appended with today’s date. If that file exists, it will read it and place it into a Lookup Table.

Next, you will need to add at least one record into the table. You can enter anything into the text box as the only validation is that it is not blank and then click the “Add Order to Table” button.

Finally, you may click the “Write Table to File” button to take the contents of the Lookup Table (visually shown on the Data Grid View) and write them to the Excel file.

The main automations to note are in the “Procedures” folder; Excel_P_CreateFile and Excel_P_WriteToFile.

Excel_P_CreateFile shows you have you might use the connector to create a file and read its contents into a Lookup Table. In addition, you can see usage of the DateTimeUtils to generate today’s date and format it. You can also see usage of the FileUtils described in more details by Jeff above to combine file paths (which is helpful in case you are unsure of whether they end with or start with a backslash).

Excel_P_WriteToFile will simply get the table from the Lookup Table and use the ImportFromTable method to write the contents to the file.