Chrome Settings Standards

Help Automation Ops
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My organization is currently standing up our production environment and we have around 30 unattended processes we are moving from our studios to the Orchestrator. While testing, we’ve noticed that we all have different Chrome settings and we are preparing to set standards for what our Chrome settings will be. Keep in mind that we have multiple robot accounts, so we have to mirror these chrome settings in every single robot account.

The two major settings we are debating on are “ask where to download” and “enable pop ups”.

For “ask where to download”, one option is to automatically download files to a downloads folder and then have it moved to a destination folder when it finishes downloading. The other option is to have a SaveAs box pop up and we enter in the file location.

For “Enable Pop Ups”, one option is to disable all pop ups and then go into the settings and enter in the specific websites that need the settings enable. The other option would be to enable all pop ups, and a similar thing could be done if there were specific websites that needed them disabled.

I’m in the losing camp for both of these debates, but it appears we are going with automatically downloading files and disabling all pop us.

My concern with automatically downloading files is that it will prevent us from having parallel processes running chrome that both download files, but I’m not even sure if running parallel chrome processes is possible yet, so I folded on this debate since it appears to work faster.

My concern with disabling all pop ups is that we are going to have to manually go in and enter the which websites need pop ups enabled for every account. As we scale, we will have to add our list of websites to every new robot’s chrome account setting. Also, when we have new processes that need pop ups enabled, then we will have to log into every robot account and enable the website, which will get painful if we have 20 or 30 robot accounts. If we enabled pop ups, then I think we could just code for the unwanted pop ups as we develop processes.

One final note is that all of our processes are built in the robotic enterprise framework, so we want all robots to have the same settings so that we can have multiple robots working a single queue at the same time.

Has anybody else ran into these issues? If so, what route did you go or did you come up with an alternative solution?

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Automatic download is much simpler and more reliable. It’s very simple to wait for a download to appear with a Retry Scope and then just move the file to where you want it. I even created a custom activity that does this for us.

Why would you disable popups at all? I see no benefit to this.

Also, these things can be set via group policy so you don’t need to log into each robot/server combo and manually set them.

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No, it won’t. The default download folder is private to the user under which the unattended automation is running. And even if multiple jobs are downloading to the same folder (because, for example, you set them all to use the same network share as the download folder - which I wouldn’t recommend) you can easily have your automation wait for the specific file it’s downloading.

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I firmly disagree with this automatic use of REF, in fact I disagree with ever using it. But that’s another discussion :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the heads up about setting group policy. We will have to look into this, but I think that will solve a lot of our concerns.

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If it helps, this is all you have to do to wait for a specific file to download:

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The number of retries X retry interval determines how long it waits.

I did this in a custom activity and added some logic so that it can also move the file and rename it, if desired:

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Oh no! RE Framework was sold to us as what we should use as our standard. I wouldn’t say it is flawless, but it seems like the best out of the box way to maximize our bot usage without having to create our own custom framework.

It would be nice if there was an option to auto generate and email reports when a queue empties, as well as option to have application exceptions written to a separate queue/report for further programming, but other than that, we haven’t had any complaints yet.

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We have just been using “Wait for Download” and then “Move File”, but I like your approach for simplicity. I’m surprised UiPath has not made that a default activity!

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Creating your own custom template is easy, and gets rid of the bloat and complexity of REF.

REF is overkill for every automation I’ve ever done. Ours is essentially an enhancement of UiPath’s “Transactional Process” template.

Our template handles config file, has all the error handling and emails built in, handles shouldStop functionality, includes all our standards for email subjects, etc

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Their Wait for Download is not designed very well, since you can’t even designate which file to wait for, so even the preliminary .tmp file a lot of browsers create while the download happens will make it think the download is complete.

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