Watch a video to learn how you can integrate an Automation Anywhere™ Bot with the document processing skills of ABBYY Vantage.
Hello. Today I’d like to share with you a video about how we do an integration between Automation Anywhere and ABBYY Vantage. Once again, being able to take advantage of two best in class platforms from RPA to OCR, with classification and extraction, and really mend them into one full process, giving us the best of both worlds. And what you see in front of us is an Automation Anywhere Bot, and this Bot is responsible for interacting with the Vantage Web Service API to pass documents and take advantage of those skills that we have within ABBYY Vantage.
So what I wanted to show you is my dual setup here, where I can show you the bot visually, but also the steps specifically called out for us. And really this is the high list of steps. Is we’re going to obtain an Access Token. We’re going to go get some skills. Specifically, look for a specific skill that we want to interact with. Then we’re going to process the files. We’re going to upload some files to ABBYY Vantage. We’re going to get the transaction information back. We’re going to download the result file and convert that Json to a CSV.
So it’s fairly simple. In fact, what I’ll do is I’ll go ahead and run the bot so that we can see what happens. I’m going to hit run. And we’re going to have a couple of message boxes that load up for us just to kind of show us the different pieces of the interaction.
This would be our Access Token. This would be our SkillID. Then we have what’s called a TransactionID within ABBYY Vantage. And once again, these message boxes are just for information purposes so that we can track how the bot is progressing. All right, now the documents have been fully processed. So what you’ll see is we have this information extracted to a CSV file. If I double click that CSV file, I will have the results that I’ve gotten back from ABBYY Vantage here within my CSV file here in Excel. So this is just one example of exporting that Json query to something that’s usable for us downstream. It gives us the ability to obviously take that Json, and do anything we want with it. Whether it’s use it within the bot, whether it is passing it to another process downstream, or consuming that Json through some other method.
So the cool part is here that we have that all working as one seamless process, but let’s dive into the bot for just a few seconds here. It’s very simple. It’s just a REST Web Service Action that we’re using within Automation Anywhere. So we’re going to go ahead, for example, post our API to Access Token Request. We’re going to go ahead and extract the data from the response and we will then get an Access Token. So if we wanted to take a look at the Access Token Request, we can pull that up here within our variable. We have a variable where we store all of these specific calls. And you can see here, we’re applying this here to the endpoint. We actually have two different URLs that we’re using. So we use the URL base of the URL, and then we use an Access Token amended to it so that we can keep those as two separate locations.
Obviously then we will extract our Access Token. Now, an interesting part here is that we want to look for a specific skill. So what we do is we can obviously get the skills through a web service post, and then we can extract the specific Web Service ID of that skilled name that we’re looking to interact with Vantage here. So what we’ve done is we’ve asked Vantage to give us a list of skills. And now we’re specifically looking for a specific skill that we will interact with downstream. So we’ll store that SkillID and a variable, which we will then use when we process new transactions.
Now we have a DLL that we use to kind of package that document and pass that over to Vantage. You’ll see, it’s actually fairly simple. All we’re doing is we’re giving it a file. We’re giving it the Web Service URL and the Header, and we’re passing it to Vantage, just programmatically, making sure that we combine all of those beautifully. But then the rest of this is once again, interacting directly with the API to get the transaction information. We actually pass a document to Vantage, and then we ask Vantage to give us the response and then we loop until it happens until we actually get a formal response. And we put a delay of five seconds here. There’s a number of different ways to do this, but this is just a very basic way to show you that we’re passing a document. And then we’re just pulling for status periodically until we get the status that we expect to receive.
Now, when we pass a document to Vantage, the important part to know is that every transaction gets logged. So we can literally see what’s going on in that transaction. We have all of the logs you can see from top to bottom, where we came from. You know, bottom is the very process starting and then it goes through a number of steps where then the workflow is completed.
Within our skill, the one thing I will tell you is our document processing skill has an output within it. And you can see here, we’re telling the software to don’t provide an output, which by default is an FTP output, but we’re just saying don’t provide one. Instead, we’ll use our Automation Anywhere actions to pull the results. So that’s what we have here. This would be a typical setup of a Process Skill, where we’re going to provide a document and we’re going to classify and extract, and then we’re going to output it, but just know here, if we’re just interacting with the Web Service API, we want to make sure that we have this first option selected here.
And then of course we will pull. And that’s what I was sharing with you here on the Automation Anywhere side. We will pull for that document periodically until we get a proper status. That means we’ve extracted the data. And then from here, we can download the result file, which is the Json file and we can convert that to anything we want. In our demo we’ve converted it to CSV, but you can obviously do all sorts of exciting things with that Json. So this is an overall solution that gives us the best in class of both worlds from RPA to OCR and classification and extraction. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you have any questions on this, please reach out. Thank you so much.
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