A2019 Bot Migration

 RPA | A2019 Bot Migration| Automation Anywhere - Part-38

A2019 Bot Migration  - In this blog we will explore about the another useful concept i.e. Bot Migration package. We will also cover the various steps and pre-requisites that are needed to migrate a bot from one version to another version using A2019 Automation Anywhere community edition.

Firstly we will discuss what does bot migration means in simple terms.

Bot Migration - Bot Migration is a technique through which we can migrate bots from one version to another version i.e. we can migrate bots from version 10 to version 11 or from version 11 to version A2019 etc. So while migrating a bot from one version to another version there might be a possibility that there might be certain list of commands that might not work while migrating to another version. 

So the next question arises how do we come to know that when migrating the bots which are the commands that will work and which one will not work when we migrate a bot to a newer version. So the simple answer to this is the "Bot Scanner" feature. So next in our list we will discuss what is bot scanner means and how does it works.

Bot Scanner - Bot scanner is a feature or utility that helps analyzing your bots and will determine which are the bots that are ready for migration and which are the ones that does not pass the migration test to A2019 enterprise version. Also, what the bot scanner does is it will help you determine the list of commands which are compatible and which are not compatible with the newer version.

To use Bot Migration Wizard we need three steps which are as follows:

• Create migration session.
• Migrate the bots.
• Validate bot functionality.

So now we will discuss the steps that are required for the migration of bots from one version to the another version. So there are 2 ways through which we can migrate our bots. We will discuss each of the 2 ways in detail one by one.

First Method - Here we will discuss the first method to migrate your bots using the Migration feature provided under the administration tab in the control room. 

• Click the Migration button under the administration tab and we will be redirected to the migrate bots page.
• In the general tab provide the name and select overwrite if you want to overwrite the file if it exists already and if you do not want to overwrite then select do not overwrite option.
• Click on Next button.
• Select the bots that you want to migrate from version 10 or version 11 to A2019 version under the bots tab and click on next button.
• Now we need to select which bot runners will be used to distribute or divide the bot migration workload. Select the list of bot runners from the available list of devices and click next button again.
• Now we have to view the parent-child bot dependencies or relationship for our selected bots. The Bots and Dependent bots list all bots including dependent parent and child bots that will be migrated and click on next button to move to next tab.
• Lastly we need to validate the user access permissions for migration of the bot. Select both, myself and run as users permission and click on validate.
• Click on Migrate bots.
• As soon as we click on migrate bots the migration process will start and we can monitor the migration activity by clicking on the entry view of any of the listed process.
• The Bot Agent will be launched and a pre-defined migration bot is deployed on the bot runner which downloads each of the selected task bots and meta bots.
• The migration bot converts the selected and dependent bot to the new format for enterprise A2019 and a new bot will be created with the .bot extension and would be available under the control room public repository.
• The results tab shows the progress of each bot as and when it is migrated. Upon completion the status is shown i.e. which bots are successfully migrated and which ones are not.
• For unsuccessful bots we can view the reason in the Bot migration results page.
• Last step we have to do is to validate the bot functionality. For validation we need to test the bot in UAT environment so that everything goes fine and then we can run in the production machine or environment.

Second Method - The second method for Bot migration is to use the bot migration package provided. To use this package follow the steps given below:

• Drag & drop migrate bot action into your workspace area.
• In the properties section select the version 11 bot which you want to migrate, check the overwrite file exists option if you want to overwrite the file else uncheck the checkbox and store the output file in the folder this is optional either you can give the path or you can leave it blank depending upon your requirement.
• Click on save button to save the bot.
• Now run the bot and the migration process will begin.

With that we come to the end of this blog where we discussed about how to migrate bots from one version to the another version  and also saw various methods to migrate the bot using A2019 Automation Anywhere and from control room. Also we discussed about what is bot scanner and why bot scanner is used in migration of bots and it's functionality.

If you have any queries regarding this blog then you can raise your queries in the comment section and I will be more than happy to answer all of your queries.

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