Apps Feedback / Improvements

Feedback Apps
1

Hey guys,

I have been working with apps now for almost a year and wanted to give some feedback / improvement ideas that might help down the line! I would like to congratulate you guys on how great apps has become, I started out when the Data Service Integration didn’t exist and we relied on running processes to get all our data. Though my current apps project is on hold while I am waiting for certain features to be added I would like to say that because of apps I can now almost create a self sufficient front end that doesn’t rely on attended / unattended bots to do all of it’s processing. For anyone looking into apps, I would highly recommend testing it out!

Now to the improvements part. These are changes that I would think would help enhance the product even more!

Better Date Time Integration With Data Service
Data Service Date/Time is in UTC so when I get the time of an entity it is converted to local time inside apps. This becomes an issue when trying to get the hour time out of the entity. Though the entity date time shows up as 8:00 AM in data service it shows up as 4:00 GMT-0400 in apps. This means that the hour variable is now 4 hours out of sync as when I run the hour function on the date it returns 4. This is where you run into edge cases as 12:00 AM becomes 8PM for the previous day, and 4am becomes 0. A better date time selector inside Apps would make the current integration so much better!

Read File from Storage Bucket
Currently we have Get File from Storage Bucket which will return the URL of the storage item and from there we can then launch a process to get the information inside the storage item, but it would be nice to remove the step of launching an automation to get the content of the storage item. Maybe there could be an implementation that would read text files only, similar to that of what’s in UiPath Studio. A reason this might be useful is reading / writing a Rich Text Box data from a storage item

Get Queue Items
We have the ability to write to queues, but it would be even cooler if we could then get the status / output of the queue items and show that in a way for end users (not them having to learn orchestrator and how to view results of queue items).

More Functions
I love the functions that we already have, but at the same time I want even more! I’m hoping that it is a quick win to add a function to Apps, but I don’t know what goes on in the backend to create the functions in the first place. If a function doesn’t exist it involves offloading it to a bot to run, which in it self is not a bad thing, but I would love a self sufficient front end!
Some function ideas I have are:
*Substring
*Index Of
*Replace
*Split
*Date Time Formatter (Could possibly be done already with the Date Selector)

All in all I love what Apps has become, and check in at least once a week to see if any new upgrades have come out. So many of my automation ideas / projects are now based around an Apps themed front end with an unattended bot running processes on the backend.

Best,

Logan Anderson

3 Likes
3

@evan.cohen @Venkata_Rajendran

4

Hi @Anderson_Logan_CEI-Atlant : Thank you for the valuable feedback.

  1. Surely, we can improve the Date time integration with the data service. We shall add a work item to address this
  2. We shall add it to the roadmap for reading the content in the storage bucket for text files
  3. Currently Apps - connection service integration is in public preview. Our plan is to leverage connections services for invoking APIs of UiPath Orchestrator or other products within Apps. This provides the customer the flexibility to call any UiPath API from Apps including getting the results of Queue items. This will be a scalable approach.
  4. We are revamping the expressions we have today with VB. Currently, this is in progress and will be a richer experience with additional capabilities.
  • Thank you
1 Like
5

I love the idea of API calls and using VB expressions, can’t wait to see where Apps goes next!