Working with Tags in a Queue

A tag is an additional piece of information you want to connect to an item in a queue. It can be added when an item is first put onto the queue or at a later stage.
Tags can be used to:

1. determine the path an item should follow in the process once it has been fetched from the queue.
2. provide additional report information on the items that have been worked

An item can have multiple tags and a tag can be removed from an item if necessary.

The tags are visible if you view the items in the Queue Management tab of the Control Room.

Create a tag when the items get added to the queue

One of the inputs in the Add to Queue action is the tag. You can type text or use a Data Item. This will add the same tag to all the items in the collection used for the Data input.

A future article will show you how to add different tags to the items in the collection.

Add a tag to an item already on the queue

At any step in the process you can add a tag to an item by using the Tag Item action from the Work Queues business object.

The inputs are

• Item ID – the Item ID for the item you want to tag. This is normally the item you got off the queue in a previous action.
• Tag – the text to be used for the tag. You can use a Data Item as well.

Remove a tag from an item already on the queue

Use the UnTag Item action from the Work Queues business object.

The inputs are

• Item ID – the Item ID for the item from which you want to remove the tag.
• Tag – the tag to be removed. You can type in text or use a Data Item.

Retrieve the tag of an item on the queue

Using the Get Item Data action you can retrieve the tag of an item and store it in a Data Item to be used later.

The only input is the Item ID of the item for which you want to get the tag.

This action has many possible outputs including the Tags. Use the appropriate Data Item to store the tag.

Use tags when getting an item from the queue

In the Get Next Item action you can limit which items Blue Prism will look at by using the Tag Filter input.

You can specify that items with a specific tag should be included by putting a plus in front of the text or excluded by putting a minus in front.

You can also do a combination of these two options. For example, “+Dept A”;”-Bonus” will look at all items on the queue which have the tag Dept A but ignore all items which have the tag Bonus. From those items Blue Prism will still get the oldest one with the highest priority.