BluePrism runtime inside Citrix desktop Ask Question

Question

I am looking at an architecture where we have the BluePrism runtime running inside a Citrix Desktop.

I see plenty of articles that talk about processing a Citrix desktop as part of an automation process, but as far as I can see they talk about firing up a Citrix app from within a process. In other words, they have a physical laptop that runs the BluePrism runtime, and part of the process requires it to run a Citrix desktop, and automate that. I understand that this scenario is problematic, and requires you to use Surface Automation.

In my case, we have a set of physical laptops, and we would like to completely replace these laptops with VMs. So the runtime will be in the same desktop as the target apps.

Question is, does this work, or are we still faced with having to convert all our BluePrism processes to use Surface Automation to get this architecture to work?

Answer 1

This works with VMs.Surface Automation isn't necessary in that case. Your objects will attach the target apps by calling their runtime process names on the VM desktop, or launch them from the parent (i.e. folder in the root desktop/server)  and then have your BluePrism objects launch attach to them. Surface Auto may be necessary if you are planning to interact with the actual Citrix Receiver (e.g. icons), but not the apps themselves once they are active on the VM desktop. all this assuming BluePrism will be also on the VM desktop environment.