TLDR: I'm trying to get one flow to "communicate" with a second flow that's running in tandem with it.
Possibly on the same machine, possibly on a different remote machine.
Effectively I've got a web-crawling flow, but it sometimes crashes and other times runs into captchas that cause it to pause what it's doing.
I'm trying to create a 2nd flow that will independently monitor if the first bot is running or not and keep track of the date/time that it was running and not running.
My initial design for this was to have a common excel spreadsheet that both bots were looking at and have the crawler write the word "Pause" to the excel sheet. When the 2nd bot sees the word pause, it logs the time then effectively starts a wait, check again, wait, check again sequence until the word pause goes away. Then it writes the current time, the duration of down time, and the time when "pause" appeared on time log spreadsheet.
Neat idea if I don't say so myself.
HOWEVER, all of this would be MUCH simpler if I could just have a shared input/output variable that both bots were monitoring/changing all the time. I wouldn't need to deal with switching back and forth between spreadsheets and such.
I would prefer not to have to nest the spreadsheets inside each other using the "run desktop flow" action (this is the only way I've found to connect input/output variables from two different desktop flows).
Anybody have some suggestions on other ways to do this?
