Ui path studio arguments? defined as variables or hard coded values

Question

I was doing practice questions for the rpa asociate exam and came across a question I was unsure on how to answer.

Suppose you have some arguments from an invoked workflow. Some are out arguments, some are in and some are in/out. The question asked which types of arguments supported being mapped to variables and which supported being mapped to hard coded values.

I didn't find much on the documentation expect a generic paragraph on arguments as a whole that said that you could map them to both variables and hard coded values regardless of direction.

Answer 1

TL;DR - If you hardcode a value to an Out or In/Out, the Out value produced cannot map to the Out argument and will not be used further down the line.

While it is probably allowed by UiPath Studio to add hardcoded values to Out or In/Out arguments, it would effectively break your automation by the nature of what an Out argument actually does.

When thinking through it, if you were to add a hardcoded value as the result of an Out or In/Out argument, all work done while the workflow is invoked would not be passed back to the invoking workflow when it is finished, since the out value produced is not able to replace a hardcoded value. An In argument, on the other hand, would work just as well whether the value is a variable or hard-coded, since that value is no longer needed as soon as the workflow that is being invoked starts (however, in most cases, it is probably still best practice to use a variable even for an In).