My overall objective atm is to find out whether OpenIAP offerings will be a suitable tool to achieve what I want to achieve, and if so in what way must they be used. I believe they are suitable, but I am not certain. I have been seeking clarification.
It is also really hard to ask questions when there is in fact disagreement in the market and in the RPA discussion groups, about the meaning of words that, as you rightly point out, should have the same special meaning for people working with rpa software. It seems they don’t, as you have also confirmed. It makes the discussion quite difficult.
However, I am (and have always been) sufficiently clear about some aspects of the terminology to assist in narrowing this down, for example the essential difference between attended and unattended; for my purposes in this dialogue, your definition of attended, using the word something is very close both to UIPath’s definitions on their forum covering the same subject, and to my understanding that attended automation / (“something(s)” triggered by and/or assisting a user), is what I want. (despite my previously having muddied the water by using the word robot in a different way than the way you have now defined it)
For the sake of this discussion, this allows us to leave out what you call unattended, and also hybrid, and concentrate only on attended. We can also leave out the multiuser scenario as this is not envisaged at this stage. (My automations as envisaged are single user only.)
I really do not mind whose terminology I use, and for a discussion on this forum it would be best to use your terminology. It was very helpful your setting it out. There do remain a few questions to clarify these definitions, and it is probably best to hit these off before my asking the other questions, which I will be better placed to redraft.
Definition/Terminology questions -
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You define a robot as an instance of OpenRPA, how can a robot be started directly inside OpenRPA (second sentence of above definition of “attended”, word robots) ? I don’t understand this. Can you clarify ?
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If one is running OpenRPA in offline mode as per your link, can one instance (which in this context I take to mean that OpenRPA has only been opened once) run multiple different workflows at the same time, or does additional each workflow that is started mean OpenRPA is opened again for each additional workflow, thus also presumably building up the RAM requirement ? How does this work ?
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Using OpenRPA terminology, do I take it that a project inside OpenRPA is simply a collection of workflows ?
Once I have these points clear (sorry they are so basic), I will be able to restate my questions using your terminology. (FWIW - I believe the OpenIAP terminology means that where I used the word robot (in my post #12) I should replace it by the word workflow, and also what I called a case 1 should be called a long running workflow. Is this correct ?)
Thanks ! I would really appreciate it if you can answer these questions one at a time so that all the terminology is defined in terms that are not open to interpretation - that would be very helpful.