For legacy applications with unstable selectors, a combination of flexible selectors (using anchors or wildcards) and a robust error-handling strategy is key. Anchor-based activities are more resilient to UI changes than pure dynamic selectors. Wrapping interactions in try-catch blocks with predefined recovery paths ensures the process can handle failures gracefully, making it the most maintainable and professional solution.

Hard-coded absolute file paths are a classic cause of failure when moving from a developer’s machine to a different runtime environment. Using Orchestrator assets to manage configuration (like file paths) ensures the process can adapt to different deployments without code changes, aligning with best practices for environment-independent automation.

The ‘Read Range’ activity into a DataTable is a standard and powerful method for handling structured but variable Excel data. Once in a DataTable, you can programmatically find the column index by its header name and then access all data in that column reliably, regardless of its physical position in the sheet. This is more robust and faster than UI-based or find/offset methods.

Business exceptions should be distinguished from system exceptions. The best practice is to catch a system exception first (e.g., in a general ‘Catch’ block), then inside that block, re-throw it or throw a new, more specific business exception. This ensures the business logic failure is propagated correctly to Orchestrator, allowing for proper monitoring, reporting, and workflow management (like moving the transaction to a specific queue).

‘WaitForReady’ on every interaction adds significant overhead. The optimal strategy is to use ‘None’ for most interactions after the page is stable, as modern web apps often don’t require a full page reload for every action. Strategic use of ‘Interactive’ or ‘Complete’ should be reserved for right after a navigation step (like clicking a link or submit button) that is known to load a new page or major section, balancing speed and reliability.

Using a shared .NET class library is the professional approach for complex data structures. It ensures strong typing across all components, provides IntelliSense support in Studio, avoids the performance cost and complexity of serialization/deserialization for in-memory calls, and centralizes the definition of your business entities for easy maintenance.

File I/O operations (opening, writing to, and closing a file) are extremely expensive when performed thousands of times in a tight loop. The most significant performance gain comes from minimizing these operations. Building the log content in memory (e.g., using a StringBuilder or a List of strings) and performing a single write at the end reduces I/O overhead by a factor of 10,000 in this case.

The ‘Activate’ property, when set to True, brings the target application window to the foreground before attempting the interaction. This is crucial in environments where the target window might not be in focus, ensuring subsequent selector-based activities can find and interact with the UI elements reliably.

The ‘Suspend’ activity is the correct choice. It pauses the execution of the workflow at that point. The workflow can later be explicitly resumed from Orchestrator (manually or via an API call), which is the intended pattern for waiting on human decisions or external events before continuing the automated process.

For legacy applications with unstable selectors, a combination of flexible selectors (using anchors or wildcards) and a robust error-handling strategy is key. Anchor-based activities are more resilient to UI changes than pure dynamic selectors. Wrapping interactions in try-catch blocks with predefined recovery paths ensures the process can handle failures gracefully, making it the most maintainable and professional solution.0