Activity deleted from workflow by Studio, not by user

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1

Has anyone experienced that an activity is being deleted in your workflow by UiPath studio?

Yesterday I made a small change to a workflow component. Nothing critical, so I just published the new version of the process to run in production this morning. I woke up to multiple errors.
The error is that a navigation check is failing. I have an image exists followed by an If with the image exists Boolean. Studio have deleted the image exists, so the Boolean is per default false, meaning I get the exception that my navigation step failed. The navigation step is in a sequence, which I did not even expand yesterday.

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Have anyone experienced similar strange behavior by studio?

First the invoke argument error which I have been dealing with for 6 months, and now this.
How can I trust this software for an enterprise wide implementation?
I have 40+ processes running in multiple departments, people relying on the robots, but if I can’t trust that Studio is not making other changes than what I make, then people can’t rely on me and my team.
I find myself spending more and more time on strange bugs in UiPath rather than supporting the business with new automations.

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Hi @Dan_Wulff_Andersen,
I totally understand why you are so angry about this but please consider the fact that UiPath is constantly working to make Studio/Robot/Orchestrator better and better. We switched up from quarterly to monthly updates, we are allowing to switch in CE to beta channel, we provided Send Feedback feature in latest release finally we have this forum to share issues and solutions. So as you see we are working to avoid as much problems as we can. Additionally with use of orchestrator you have the possibility to test your workflow with development robot type on test machine without putting whole changes to production. (Actually from my experience this approach almost always ended up with some fails and errors because of lack of testing).

Regarding your issue. I see first time this kind of issue. It’s hard to say if problem was caused by studio itself or it was a issue with saving the file or something completely different. Which version and edition of Studio do you have?

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I wouldn’t say that I’m angry, but I’m a little frustrated.
Sorry to say, but I don’t really care about all the new things that you release if the basic functionality is not stable.
Yes, I should have tested, but it is not always easy to have test data, and with the small change I made, it was not necessary.

My colleague has previously complained about strange behavior, but I have not taken it seriously earlier, I have always believed it to be human mistake. But now I can see that strange things do happen.
It is also the first time I see this kind of issue. The Invoke error, there were some logic behind that bug, but this just seem totally random and is of cause not something that I will be able to replicate.

Studio version: 18.4.5
UiAutomation.activities and System.activities version: 19.7.0

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It’s still hard to say what caused this behavior. I know it’s easy to say but in my opinion it’s always good to use as new version as possible. New versions are not only about ‘new things’ like you said. It’s also about bug fixes, security fixes, some important implementations and so on.
Having said all that - do you think you could give us clues as to how we could reproduce the bug? If the behavior was not a human error, then it is a bug we would really like to see fixed

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Bug fixes and introduction of new bugs :wink: it is hard to tell which is best. But I will of cause update to 19.4.4 in the near future. On that note, how well does orchestrator 18.3.2 work together with studio/robot 19.4.4?

As I wrote, then no, I will not be able to reproduce the error.
I deleted 2 invoke workflow, deleted 1 assign, and added one argument, which replaced a variable. Then removed the unused variables. Then save.
Normal workflow changes in studio, without touching the affected sequences, which were collapsed the whole time.
I don’t expect you to be able to reproduce and fix this bug. I just wanted to create awareness and share my experiences.

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Thanks for sharing this. I will have eye on that in case similar issue occur for someone else.
Regarding compatibility please have a look here: