Hi,

• (P.S.) Starting with Pega 8.4.1, Pegasystems provides "Pega Open Robotics" with which you can integrate with UiPath without building connectors from scratch. The documentation attached in this post was created back in Pega 7.4 days when Pega Open Robotics was not developed. I will keep this post available for reference purposes but I recommend that you use Pega Open Robotics to save time. You can download it from Pega Marketplace (https://community.pega.com/marketplace/integrations/pega-open-robotics).

Pega Platform is capable of integrating with third-party RPA software. Our recommendation is always to use Pega Robotics, as we provide an out-of-the-box control tower called “Robot Manager” that manages your robots without any additional implementation. However, if customers already have other vendor’s robots in place, or there are any specific reasons to use non-Pega RPA solution, that is okay, we can still leverage it by integration. In my personal experiences over the last couple of years, top two most popular RPA software I worked on are UiPath and WinActor, both of which are the market leaders in Japan.

UiPath also has management software called “UiPath Orchestrator” which offers similar functionality as Pega Robot Manager. UiPath Orchestrator provides a REST API based on the OData (Open Data Protocol) protocol, that is an ISO/IEC approved, OASIS standard that defines a set of best practices for building and consuming RESTful APIs. With Pega Platform, you can easily build REST Connectors and invoke or retrieve information about a UiPath Orchestrator resource from within your Pega application (e.g. start jobs or create queue items which can be processed by robots, etc). The specifications of APIs can be referenced by accessing Swagger URL that is dependent on the Orchestrator instance you use.

In this post, I am sharing how to build UiPath Connectors in Pega 7.4. I’ve prepared four PCs locally as below diagram. The scenario I came up with in this PoC is as follows:

User enters two values, X and Y for input arguments from screen and submits (PC #2). This is Pega’s flow action. Then Pega Platform advances a flow and reaches “Call RPA” shape (PC #1). Connect REST gets invoked and initiates communication with UiPath Orchestrator (PC #3). UiPath starts job and input arguments (X and Y) are passed to UiPath robot (PC #4). UiPath robot opens Excel and calculate X plus Y. Robot figures the result on Excel and job is completed. The result and status are updated on the job table in UiPath Orchestrator. UiPath Orchestrator proactively pushes the result back to Pega Platform via Webhook. Pega Platform opens the work object and updates the result in the database.

Please see attached file for the detailed steps to perform this task. The document contains not only how to build REST Connector but also additional steps such as how to install UiPath Orchestrator including IIS / MS SQLServer, setup certificate, and backup, etc. So it should help not only cloud project but also on-premise users. The following contents are included (sorry, but document is all written in Japanese).

(1) How to set up UiPath Studio

(2) How to set up UiPath Orchestrator

(3) How to call REST APIs from UiPath Orchestrator

(4) How to call REST APIs from Postman

(5) How to call REST APIs from Pega Platform via UiPath Orchestrator (Connect REST)

(6) How to set up Webhook on UiPath Orchestrator

(7) How to process REST requests from Webhook (Service REST)

(8) How to back up UiPath Orchestrator

* I've also posted a little higher-level article as to where to put the effort, either BPM or RPA. I would suggest you go through https://collaborate.pega.com/discussion/bpm-vs-rpa, if you haven't.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,