RoboTask forum

I've made a number of suggestiong that I feel would be relatively simple to impliment and very useful.  Among them: SFTP, FTP synchronize, Wildcards in email attachments, GoTo line functions for Text Loops, dynamic character transformations for variable values (like excel functions END, MID, etc.).   I'm glad that at least some of these have made it onto the "to-do" list, and there are workarounds for some (ie. you can achieve HIPPA-level security compliance without SFTP using an encrypted VPN tunnel), but most of these suggestions actually remove limitations from what you can do with Robotask.
But I've also considered some features that would NOT be as easy to impliment, and are not *critical*, but would be increbable.
1) The ability to group (and expand/collapse the groups) functions within tasks.  Some of my tasks are very long, so simply to duplicate a function and move it to the correct location can be time consuming.
2) The ability to move a function or group of functions with settings in tact beween tasks.  Maybe by way of a "Function Clipboard"
3) A way to "Protect Task Variables."  I have a number of slightly different tasks running almost all day long.  Since I have so many different (but very similar) tasks, I used variables whenever I could so that I could simply duplicate tasks and change a few variables like {Path} and {ClientName}.  The problem is that since I'm duplicating the variable names, if two tasks run at once, the second task will overwrite the variable values and corrupt the first task.  I've tried to stagger my timings, but there are only so many minutes in a day.  I think the way to "fix" this would be to give an option in every Task's Advanced dialogue to "Protect Task Variables" by either creating a variable subdirectory for each task or adding... say... the External Taks Name as a prefix to each protected variable.  Of course, each fucntion that creates or calls a variable when this Task mode is enabled should have a check-box or something for "Universal Variable / Task Variable" to override this Task setting in some cases. 
4) and much in the same spirit as (3), the option to Start Task "As Protected Instance" or "As global task."  A protected instance would automatically prefix all the StartED Task's variables with the StartING task's prefixes (and/or in the "Protected" variable directory specific to the "started" task.  This would basically let you start and run several copies of the same subtasks at the same time without confusing variables.  An even more advanced version of this would actually allow the StartED task itself to protect variables (a subdirectory within the StartING task's subdirectory?) so that a single startING task could run several instances of the same StartED task.  But that's adding complexity that might confuse a lot of users.  I'd love it, but I'm not sure if it's practical.
5) A master schedule list.  Instead of making scheduler a Task-specific function, make a Schedule... Each line allows you to simply input a time and start a task at that time.  When you're started 30+ tasks a day, having once central control panel for them all would be great.
6) Finally, an off the wall suggestion: The Robotask client.  A totally stripped version of Robotask (no help, no editor) that can be directed to the server running the full version and then execute a locally a copy of Tasks stored on the server based on local triggers.  That would be incredibly handy, since you could potentially RUN all your tasks on the client (effectively protecting all your variables, and distributing the computing load to more CPUs).  It would be a good idea to allow the client to set whether "local paths" become local to the client box or become paths networked to the server's directories.  I'd imagine that such a solution would be an added revenue source as well.  Say each server copy comes with one free client licence, and you can buy more at $20 a pop. 
Cheers,
-Brendan

Thank you for your suggestions. We wrote theirs into ToDo list.

Hi Oleg,
Hope you're doing well!  Thanks to your help my RT server has delivered about 200,000 documents now, through email, ftp, and even through fax (printing to ActiveFax).  So far no complications at all. 
I did think of an interesting suggestion.  An expanded "File Loop" function.  It would be great to be able to pick the loop delimiter. For example, text file 'lines' are created with a [return] character (ASCII looks like a box).  In would be interesting to be able to use a variable as a delimiter.  So, for example, if you had a CSV file, you could pull the lines apart into individual text strings.  I also run into a number if medical record file formats that use |pipe|delimters.
Do you think there is any way to do that?
Thanks!  -Brendan

So, for example, if you had a CSV file, you could pull the lines apart into individual text strings. I also run into a number if medical record file formats that use |pipe|delimters.

There is "Delimited variable" for this purpose. This action was included into "variables" plugin since version 2.2. It allows you to normalize delimited string with any delimiters to comma-separated text, and save result into user variable. Next, you can access to any part of this string so: {My_Variable(0)}, {My_Variable(1)} and so on.

Another vote for secure ftp.