Spying of Sharepoint is very slow in Blue Prism

Question

I have a sharepoint and spying works well if records are record 100-200 in a list. As soon as records increase beyond 500, spying becomes slow and takes more than a minute to spy. I have tried using spying with Path property with MatchIndex set to 1. I have so far tried in html mode and after seeing this , I am not confident on AA mode spying. Has anyone faced such challenges and what is the procedure adopted to speeden the spying, any inputs will help.

Answer 1

The important setting should be done i.e

1. You might have to do some administrative changes i.e You need to enable Ms Access Engine on SP list

2. We need to install MS Access engine so that SharePoint List will get compress and just before starting the table you can able to see the Ms - Access logo.

Need to write the macro in MS - Access to fetch the data from SP List and Update/Refresh back to the SharePoint, by doing this you need not dependent importing SharePoint list data manually.

In Ms - Access, all the SP list will be created and stored in table. The macro will just refreshes the table data, you can query MS- Access Extractor file by using OLEDB and also you can use Insert/update/delete queries as well

While opening the Ms - Access File, you just need to launch the SharePoint default site (It is dependent on how coding is done in Ms - Access Macro to access the SP List).

And I would like to say that this is the best and reliable approach to work with SP List as per my knowledge.

Unfortunately, Currently I don't have the MS - Access Code :(. If i could have, I am happy to post it.

Answer 2

Two things right off the bat you can do to reduce the amount of time it takes to spy all these elements:

1. Stick to HTML mode like you've said - it'll be faster than any other spy mode in the long run.

2. Spy a single element of a particular type (say, a file in a list of files) and set the Path attribute dynamically from your object. Enumerate list items and tell Blue Prism which element to run actions on by the same Path attribute.

As an alternative to all this, code against whatever Sharepoint API is available to you. Ditch the UI automation and focus solely on leveraging whatever functionality is necessary using exposed back-end interactions. This eliminates your spying requirement entirely, as everything is handled on a code-level basis. It'll also eliminate a significant portion of your processing time by not having to traverse user interfaces.

Answer 3

I agree with esqew on the point of trying to avoid standard UI automation of SharePoint as much as possible. However, if you are not tech savvy enough to use APIs, an easier alternative is to use a database connection.

This can be achieved easily using Microsoft Access as an intermediary between the list and BluePrism. Here are some guides (video or article)

There are some limitations of course, but if you are interested in reading only then it may be a viable option for you.