Command Prompt Activities

The package contains five Windows command prompt custom activities. These activities can be used to execute CMD commands and also retrieve the command outputs from the command prompt console

ExecuteSingleCommand Activity: This activity opens the command prompt, executes the provided command and returns the console output as a string.

If the input property SingleLineOutput is set to True then only the specific command output will be retrieved, else by default the entire console output will be fetched.

This activity is helpful when only a single command has to be executed and the command output has to be fetched.

OpenCommandPrompt Activity: This activity opens the command prompt session and provides the CMD process as output. This activity has no input parameters. The output from this activity is used as input for the activities ExecuteCommand, CloseCommand and GetConsoleOutput.

ExecuteCommand Activity: This activity executes the specified input command on the already opened command prompt process. This activity is useful when multiple commands have to be executed on the same command prompt session.

CloseCommand Activity: This activity closes the input stream to the specified command prompt process. This activity must be used after the OpenCommandPrompt and ExecuteCommand activities. 

GetConsoleOutput Activity: This activity is used to get the command prompt console output as a string once the commands are executed and closed using the ExecuteCommand and CloseCommand activities respectively. The activity has the complete console output of the executed commands of the specified command prompt session. 

Complete details of how to use these activities can be found in the attached document.

The benefit of these activities is that they can be used to execute the windows CMD commands in background without having to open command prompt console in foreground. These activities are helpful if the output of the commands have to be fetched. The command outputs can be directly fetched as a string, eliminating the need for using screen scraping methods to extract data from CMD console. These activities can also be used to execute single or multiple commands in the same CMD session.