ASD01 Sample Questions & Answers

True or False: When a Blue Prism process is exposed as a web service, the 'max-instances' setting in the web service configuration in System Manager determines the maximum number of concurrent requests the service can handle by spinning up that many process instances.

A solution is designed with a 'Controller' process that populates a work queue from a master spreadsheet. Multiple 'Worker' processes then work the items from this queue. The design document states that the Controller process must run to completion before any Worker processes begin, to avoid processing an incomplete set of data. Which mechanism should be used to enforce this dependency in the most reliable way?

A retail company is automating its order fulfillment process. The process reads order details from an e-commerce platform's REST API, processes them, and updates an internal inventory system. The development team has created a Visual Business Object (VBO) to handle all API interactions. During testing, they find that the API's authentication token expires every 60 minutes, causing the process to fail with '401 Unauthorized' errors.

The current VBO design has separate actions for 'Get Orders', 'Update Order Status', and other business functions. Each of these actions makes a direct call to the API. There is no centralized mechanism for handling authentication.

What is the most appropriate design change to the VBO to manage the API authentication lifecycle efficiently and robustly?

A process has been designed to read data from an Excel spreadsheet, but it is failing intermittently with a 'System.OutOfMemoryException' when processing very large files. The current design uses the 'Get Worksheet as Collection' action from the MS Excel VBO to load the entire sheet into memory at the start of the process. The solution must be redesigned to handle files of any size without running out of memory. Which design change is the most appropriate solution?

Case Study: Invoice Processing Automation

Company Background: Global Freight Inc. (GFI) is a logistics company that processes over 5,000 invoices daily. These invoices arrive as PDF attachments in a dedicated email inbox. The finance team manually opens each email, downloads the PDF, extracts key information (Invoice #, Vendor Name, Amount, Due Date), and enters it into their legacy ERP system, which is a Windows-based desktop application.

Automation Requirements: GFI wants to automate this process using Blue Prism. The solution must be scalable to handle peak volumes of up to 10,000 invoices per day. The solution needs to be resilient to application outages and handle various invoice formats from different vendors. A key requirement is that the solution must provide a clear audit trail and a mechanism for the finance team to handle invoices that the robot cannot process (exceptions).

Proposed Solution Design: The proposed solution consists of three processes:

1. Process 1 (Email Reader): Runs every 15 minutes. It reads the inbox, downloads PDF attachments, and adds a new item to a 'New Invoices' work queue for each PDF. The email is then moved to a 'Processed' folder.
2. Process 2 (Data Extraction): Multiple robots run this process concurrently. They get an item from the 'New Invoices' queue, use an OCR tool to extract data from the PDF, and if successful, add the extracted data to a 'Validated Invoices' work queue. If OCR fails or confidence is low, the item is marked as an exception in the 'New Invoices' queue.
3. Process 3 (ERP Entry): Multiple robots run this process. They get an item from the 'Validated Invoices' queue and enter the data into the ERP system. If the ERP system is down, the process should stop gracefully and resume later.

Which of the following represents a critical flaw in this proposed solution design?

A developer is consuming an external REST API that returns a JSON array of customer objects. They are using the 'HTTP Request' action from the Utility - HTTP VBO. The action executes successfully, but when they try to parse the response content using the 'Get Collection from JSON' action from the Utility - JSON VBO, it fails with an error. The JSON response is structured as follows:

{
"status": "success",
"data": {
"customers": [
{ "id": 1, "name": "John Doe" },
{ "id": 2, "name": "Jane Smith" }
]
}
}

The developer has passed the entire response content to the 'JSON Text' input and 'customers' to the 'Collection Path' input of the 'Get Collection from JSON' action. Why is the action failing?

During a peer review of a new process, you notice that a developer has used multiple 'Terminate' stages on the main page to handle different exit conditions. Why is this considered poor design practice in Blue Prism?

A solution requires a 'parent' process to add multiple items to a work queue, and then launch several instances of a 'child' process to work on those items concurrently. Which Blue Prism action should the parent process use to start the child processes without waiting for them to complete?

A process working on a queue of customer update requests occasionally fails due to a target application being temporarily unavailable. The design requires that if a case fails with a system exception, it should be automatically retried up to three times, with a 5-minute delay between each attempt. If it fails a third time, it should be marked as a business exception for manual review. How should the 'Max Attempts' property on the work queue be configured to meet this requirement?

A solution designer needs to create a process that can be triggered on demand by users through an external system. The external system can make a REST API call to Blue Prism. The process requires several input parameters (e.g., CustomerID, CaseType) to be passed in the API call. Which of the following components must be configured to achieve this? (Select THREE)