You asked and we listened! We proudly present the best version of our UiPath Studio IDE yet. In this release we mainly focused on agility, reusability and runtime reliability.
How to get your hands on it? Easy peasy:
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Switch to Beta channel available only in Community Edition and accessible from Help section - “Update channel” option. Or download from here: https://cloud.uipath.com/
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Restart UiPath Studio
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Buckle up
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Start exploring
If you still wanna hang around before launching your beta version, here are the highlights of this release:
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Library (Reusable Components)
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Dependencies per Project & Dependency Rules
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UI Automation Activities Decoupling
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Enhanced Package Manager
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Enhanced Publishing options and Release Notes
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Studio Agility Pack improvements
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Localization (JP)
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Source Control
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Selector Editor & UI Explorer
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Project Panel
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Debugging
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Studio Settings
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Resizable and searchable Robot Tray
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Switch between multiple Orchestrators from Tray
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Attended Automation activities / Custom input forms
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Office Suite interaction activities (Excel and Word)
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Invoke Java
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Cryptography package
Library - "reusability is key in reducing bugs and coding quickly”
On opening Studio you will notice that in the Start section you can now choose to create a new type of project, namely Library.
A Library is a collection of reusable components. A reusable component is a workflow, defined within a library project, that can be compiled and packaged as an activity and reused in multiple processes. So go ahead and define all that common code once and reuse it multiple times. You can now create these workflows and publish them as activities.
Dependencies per Project
See, define and customize project dependencies from within Studio at design time. It’s easier than ever to have control on the runtime behavior by choosing runtime rules for each package dependency. The ability to choose which version of a certain package of activities to use during runtime is a huge troubleshooting and change management improvement.
You can see dependencies directly in the Project Panel.
For each new project there are 4 default dependencies: UIAutomation, System, Excel and Mail. UIAutomation and System packages are formerly known together as CoreActivities package. We decided to split and decouple.
Libraries can be added to any Studio Project as a dependency.
In terms of Runtime Rules, you can choose between Strict and Lowest Applicable Version.
The new and amazing Package Manager
Meet the new package manager which means a complete revamp of the UI and new contextual and inline actions. Manage Packages is a huge step forward in terms of agility, usability, performance, UI & UX. You can now access it from Design Ribbon.
When opened, you can see all the dependencies linked to the current project. On the Settings tab you will find the Default package sources and the User defined package sources.
Enhanced publishing options
Publish to Orchestrator? To custom feeds? Secured feeds? Locally? Add release notes? Choose a custom version? You now have it all.
Studio Agility Pack
2018.3 brings agility improvements in all areas. Source Control, Selector Editor & UI Explorer, Project Panel, Debugging, Studio Settings - just to name a few.
Robot Tray
The Robot tray is now resizable and searchable. In terms of usability we’ve made it easier to navigate to Robot Settings by right clicking the tray icon.
You can also switch between multiple Orchestrator instances directly from Robot Tray (Orchestrator URL in Settings has a dropdown from which you can select the Orchestrator instance you want to connect to).
Attended Automation activities
Block User Input activity disables the Mouse/Keyboard for Attended Automation according to the block options selected.
Custom Input Forms activity enables you to gather data through a custom HTML input form and then use it inside that same workflow.
Office Suite interaction activities
“Excel” is the most searched term in our Forum so we know this activity pack is highly used. The first thing we did is to include it to the default Dependencies. But this is not all, this release brings 14 new activities in UiPath.Excel.Activities pack.
Word Activities Pack is not left behind and it’s improved with two new activities: Replace Picture and Insert DataTable.
Invoke Java
After VB.NET and Python, Java found its way into our platform. This pack brings 7 new activities and a new UiPath datatype that can host Java objects: JavaObject.
Cryptography package
That’s for real, activities that allow text and file encryption, decryption and hashing.
Remember to add the beta feed in Manage Packages in order to get all the goodies: https://www.myget.org/F/uipath.
Oh and while we did all of this we also localized the entire product. Japanese is now available and other language packs will come soon.
Feel free to dive and explore these new capabilities and give us feedback.