Answer a run that waits¶

A virtual employee is an assistant with a standing task that it carries out on its own, on a timetable or when someone presses Run now. Every time it starts is a run. Sometimes a run stops and asks a person before it goes on: it waits. This page is for you as a member who is asked.

Where you see a wait¶

Open the Cockpit in the navigation (on a phone, the Cockpit tab). A number beside it counts the runs waiting on you; it is read again every minute while the page is open. In the Cockpit, the tile waiting on you filters the list to those runs, and each has a Review button. You also get a notification, by mail as well unless you switched that off in your notification settings, when a run starts waiting on you and once more, as a reminder, if it is still waiting after a while.

Who is asked¶

The people the virtual employee names for "needs attention" (directly or through a group), the person who started the run, and everyone who may use virtual employees in your organisation. Whoever only sees virtual employees, an auditor for example, reads a run and its waits and does not answer them. If you can read a wait and see no buttons, that is why.

What you can be asked¶

• Approve a tool call. The assistant's call is held until someone decides, and the card shows the tool and exactly what it will be called with. Choose Approve, or Reject with a comment that goes back to the assistant. A rejected call is never made. When the tool always asks for approval, the call is also under Approvals (Approve a tool).
• Answer a question. The card shows the question and its fields. Fill them in, choose one of the options where the assistant offers some (or Something else… to write your own), and tick I don't know for a field you cannot answer. Choose Send.
• Decide on checks that were not met. When a run reports that it did not meet its criteria, the card lists them. Continue anyway accepts them as unmet: the run goes on and can still complete. Don't continue lets the run end as failed.
• Sign in at a connection. The assistant's account has no sign-in yet at a connection the run needs, and the card names it. The people asked and your organisation's administrators are told. Whoever may change this virtual employee and holds everything its account holds sees Sign in at and the connection's name; anyone else is told to ask such a person. Sign in with the account your organisation set aside for this assistant, not your own: everything the assistant does at that connection happens under the login you use, for all its virtual employees, and OS cannot see or undo it. Nobody answers this wait: within about a minute of the sign-in the run goes on by itself.

The first answer counts: if a colleague answered before you, OS tells you so. A wait nobody answers within 30 days is cancelled, and the run ends as failed; a wait for a sign-in stops after 7 days, and the employee's next scheduled moment starts a new run.

After you answer¶

The run goes on at once. The run's page shows its history item by item, with who answered each wait and when. From the same page you can stop a run that is still working, run a finished run again and delete it, where your rights allow that; the buttons you may not use are not shown. The history's model calls show what the assistant did between the steps. What a run cost appears under Details, only when your organisation lets you see costs.

Via the API¶

GET /api/v1/organisations/{id}/runs/attention counts the runs waiting on you; GET …/runs/{run_id} returns a run with its waits; POST …/runs/{run_id}/waits/{wait_id}/answer answers one, with decision (approved or rejected) and an optional comment, or values for a question; POST …/runs/{run_id}/waits/{wait_id}/sign-in answers where to sign in for a wait for a sign-in (url, expires_at), to open as a whole page and never keep, for whoever may change the virtual employee and holds its account; POST …/runs/{run_id}/cancel stops a run.