Attended Vs Unattended issue

[Nick1]

Hi there,

I have a flow that processes multiple documents using a combination of Power Automate cloud to get the document and Power Automate Desktop (PAD) to write it to the local on-premise application in Internet Explorer (IE) browser.

When the flow is run in Attended mode it works perfectly, when I then switch it over to run in Unattended mode it fails at the processing of the second or third document onwards.

What could cause this difference between Attended and Unattended mode? The test documents being processed are identical, so its not a data issue.

In Unattended mode, Power Automate cloud shows the entire flow as having completed successfully, no errors, but when I manually check the applications database for the new document they are not there, and based on that I know PAD failed to process the document.

Wondering if Unattended mode by default tries to run faster than Attended mode and therefore the PAD part fails because the application cannot keep up, could that be it? 

Being an on-premise legacy application that performs best in IE, PAD uses a combination of web UI elements and some desktop elements to target input fields, in case that makes any difference, but since there are not any explicit errored steps, its challenging to debug the issue 😞

The Power Automate cloud 'Desktop Flows' tab shows the details of the run step-by-step but since its doesn't explicitly fail at a particular step each time and the PAD flow consists of a large number of steps its challenging add error handling to each step.

I cannot share the actual flow, hope this description is enough to give an understanding of the issue. Any suggestions of how I can troubleshoot it further in Unattended mode is much appreciated.

[fraenK]

Why don't you add verification checks in your flow if the last action has been completed successfully? (should be part of your flow anyway)

Any UI or web element step needs to include a waiting action, otherwise the flow and application gets out of sync.

[Nick1 · Accepted solution]

Hi @fraenK, thanks for taking the time to respond. I got it working, main difference being I adding multiple 'waits' between steps which slowed PAD down enough for documents to be processed correctly. Out of interest, what do you mean by 'add verification checks'?? How would you do that?

[fraenK]

Depending on how your documents are processed, you'll need to add a step which waits for it and a step which checks if the document has been processed successfully or not. How to wait/check depends on which elements are presented by the application (UI/web)