ASD01 SS&C Blue Prism Solution Designer Certification Practice Questions
Prepare for ASD01 with more than an answer.
- Exam fee
- $150 USD
- Level
- Professional
- Valid for
- 3 years
Domains covered on the exam 6
- Best Practice for Building Objects and Processes20%
- Exception Handling20%
- Debugging15%
- Web Services - Exposing and Consuming20%
- Work Queues20%
- General Items5%
- 1
A process working on a queue of customer update requests occasionally fails due to a target application being temporarily unavailable. The design requires that if a case fails with a system exception, it should be automatically retried up to three times, with a 5-minute delay between each attempt. If it fails a third time, it should be marked as a business exception for manual review. How should the 'Max Attempts' property on the work queue be configured to meet this requirement?
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Correct answer: B
'Max Attempts' defines the total number of times an item can be worked before being automatically marked as an exception. A value of 3 means the item will be attempted once initially, and if it fails with a system exception, it can be retried two more times. After the third failed attempt, the queue controller will automatically move the item to the exception state. The 5-minute delay is handled by deferring the item in the process logic, not by the queue's Max Attempts setting.
- 2
A solution designer needs to create a process that can be triggered on demand by users through an external system. The external system can make a REST API call to Blue Prism. The process requires several input parameters (e.g., CustomerID, CaseType) to be passed in the API call. Which of the following components must be configured to achieve this? (Select THREE)
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Correct answer: A, C, D
The input parameters of the process's main page Start stage define the data contract for the exposed web service. These parameters will be populated from the data passed in the web service request.
Publishing a process makes it available to the web service listener. Without this step, Blue Prism will not know which process to execute when a request for that service name is received.
For security and auditing, a role with the 'Web Service Listener' permission is required. This role is then assigned to the web service group in the System Manager settings, which governs access to the published processes within that group.
- 3
You are debugging a process that interacts with a web page. You need to verify the value of an attribute of a hidden HTML element without making it visible. Which debugging technique would allow you to do this?
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Correct answer: C
This is a powerful but lesser-known debugging feature. The Application Modeller, when attached to a live browser instance, can perform actions directly. By selecting the element in the element tree and using the built-in 'Get Attribute' function from the menu, you can query any of its attributes (like 'id', 'class', 'value', etc.) in real-time and see the result in a dialog box, without having to add a 'Read' stage to your process and run it.
- 4
A solution is designed where multiple processes need to access and update a shared configuration file (e.g., an XML file containing daily exchange rates). To prevent race conditions and data corruption, only one process should be able to write to the file at a time. What is the standard Blue Prism mechanism for managing this type of shared resource contention?
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Correct answer: B
Environment Locks are specifically designed for this purpose. They provide a global, environment-wide mutex (mutual exclusion) mechanism. A process can attempt to acquire a named lock. If the lock is already held by another process, the action will wait for a specified timeout. This ensures that the critical section of code (in this case, file I/O) is executed by only one process at a time, preventing data corruption.
- 5
True or False: A business object's 'Initialize' page is executed every time any action within that object is called from a process.
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Correct answer: B
The statement is false. The 'Initialize' page of a business object is executed only once per instance of that object within a process run. It runs before the very first action is called. Subsequent calls to other actions within the same object instance do not re-trigger the Initialize page. It is used for one-time setup activities.
- 6
When designing an exception handling framework, a key decision is where to place recovery blocks. A junior developer has placed a large recovery block around the entire main loop of a process that gets and processes work queue items. An unhandled exception anywhere in the loop transfers control to this single recovery block. What is the primary disadvantage of this design approach?
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Correct answer: B
A single, large recovery block is a poor design because it treats all exceptions identically. It loses the context of where the error occurred. A better design uses smaller, more granular recovery blocks around specific actions or logical groups of actions (e.g., one around 'Login', another around 'Submit Data'). This allows for context-specific recovery. For example, a login failure might require a retry, whereas a data submission failure might require marking the item as a business exception. The monolithic approach cannot make this distinction easily.
- 7
Case Study: Patient Record Migration
Company Background: A large hospital network, HealthSpan, is migrating patient records from a legacy system (MedRec) to a new cloud-based platform (HealthCloud). The migration involves moving millions of records and must be completed with 100% accuracy. The data is highly sensitive and protected by regulations.
Automation Requirements: A Blue Prism solution is required to orchestrate the migration. For each patient ID provided in a master list, the robot must: 1. Read the full patient record from MedRec (a thick-client application). 2. Transform the data into the format required by HealthCloud. 3. Submit the transformed data to HealthCloud via a secure REST API. 4. Log the result of the submission (Success/Failure) in an audit database.
Technical Constraints:
- A single robot user account cannot have access to both MedRec and HealthCloud simultaneously due to security policies.
- The entire end-to-end process for a single record must be auditable.
- The solution must be able to run on a pool of 20 robots to meet migration deadlines.
Proposed Architecture:
flowchart TD subgraph Robot_Pool_A [Robot Pool A (MedRec Access)] P1[Process 1: Get Record from MedRec] end subgraph Robot_Pool_B [Robot Pool B (HealthCloud Access)] P2[Process 2: Submit to HealthCloud] end MasterList[(Master List of IDs)] --> Q1[WQ: Pending Extraction] Q1 --> P1 P1 --> Q2[WQ: Pending Submission] Q2 --> P2 P2 --> AuditDB[(Audit Database)]In this design, Process 1 reads from the 'Pending Extraction' queue, gets data from MedRec, and places it in the 'Pending Submission' queue. Process 2 reads from the 'Pending Submission' queue and calls the HealthCloud API. What is a significant design risk associated with this architecture?
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Correct answer: B
This is a critical security and compliance flaw. The design involves extracting highly sensitive patient data from MedRec and then storing it, likely in plain text or a simple collection, within a Blue Prism work queue item. Work queues, even if the database is encrypted at rest, are not designed to be a secure, long-term repository for sensitive data in transit between processes. The data is vulnerable at this stage. A compliant solution would encrypt the data payload immediately after extraction in Process 1 before adding it to the queue, and then decrypt it in Process 2 just before submission, using a shared key from the Credential Manager.
- 8
A financial services firm is automating a loan origination process that interacts with a legacy mainframe application. The solution design specifies that a single, monolithic Visual Business Object (VBO) will handle all interactions with the mainframe, including login, navigating through multiple screens, data entry, and logout. The process works correctly during UAT with a single robot. However, during performance testing with five concurrent robots, frequent session termination errors occur on the mainframe. The mainframe has a hard limit of five concurrent user sessions. Which design modification represents the most robust and scalable solution to this problem?
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Correct answer: B
This is the best practice for managing limited, resource-intensive connections like mainframe sessions. Separating session management from business logic allows for the creation of a session 'pool'. A central session manager object can control the five available sessions, handing them out to worker processes as needed and reclaiming them upon completion. This prevents contention, maximizes the use of available sessions, and scales effectively without serializing the entire process.
- 9
A process is designed to handle insurance claims. It pulls items from a work queue, processes them, and is expected to run 24/7. During a production run, a NullReferenceException occurs deep within a sub-process called 'Process_Claim_Details'. The current exception handling is configured at the Main Page level only, with a single Recovery block that marks the queue item as an exception and gets the next case. This design causes the robot to enter a continuous loop, repeatedly failing on the same case without resolution. Which two modifications should be made to create a more resilient and informative exception handling mechanism? (Select TWO)
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Correct answer: A, D
Placing an exception handler closer to the source of the error allows for more specific details to be logged (e.g., the values of local data items at the time of failure). Re-throwing the exception (bubbling it up) allows the main process to handle the business-level recovery, such as marking the work queue item as an exception.
This design prevents infinite loops for persistent system exceptions. By tracking the number of attempts for a specific item, the process can distinguish between transient errors (which might be resolved by a retry) and permanent failures. After a set number of attempts, the item should be marked as a business exception for manual review.
- 10
A Blue Prism process designed to scrape data from a web application is running significantly slower than expected. A solution designer is using the debugger to investigate. They have placed breakpoints and are stepping through the process. They observe that a 'Wait' stage, configured to wait for a specific element to exist on a web page, is consistently taking the full 30-second timeout period before proceeding, even though the element appears on the screen within 2-3 seconds. What is the most likely cause of this debugging observation?
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Correct answer: C
This is a classic performance issue. If the attributes defined in the Application Modeller for the target element match multiple elements on the page, Blue Prism cannot resolve the ambiguity. It will continue to search for a unique match until the Wait stage's timeout is reached. The element might be visible, but Blue Prism cannot confirm it is the correct element. The solution is to refine the attributes in the Application Modeller to ensure they uniquely identify only the single, desired element.
