Hi, I get an exception message “Timeout reached…”. Can anyone explain what causes such exception messages? It is not the same as “Activity timeout exceeded”, which you normally get if e.g. Wait element vanish times out, so I do not understand what kind of activities could cause this one.
So activities on their own have a timeout to prevent them from running forever. For example, if you say “Click Text” - if UiPath can’t find the text within 30 seconds (default) then it will timeout and throw an error. You then need to handle that error. You can change the timeout to increase or decrease depending on the application you’re working with.
In answer to your question, many activities have this timeout feature and can “fail”. Element exists / Wait element do not operate in the same way because they are designed to deal with exactly this. Instead, element exists returns a boolean after the 30 seconds indicating whether the text you wanted to click was available or note.
RD
But if the activity “Click text” times out, then the exception message is still going to be something like “Cannot find the Ui Element corresponding to this selector…”, at least that is what I get when testing this.
My question is what kind of activities will throw the exception message “Timeout reached…”? I am not able to reproduce this exception message, which I observe is not the exception message you get from activity wait element vanish (which is “Activity timeout exceeded”). I am working with a process that throws this exception, but I am not able to locate where it comes from.
Sorry, I understand what you mean now. This is just the error messages that are defined by UiPath, Wait Element Vanish definitely does this as you say. Also it’s possible that Mail activities will throw this error.
I can’t think of a principle for when you would get this except that for Wait Element Vanish the selector obviously exists so you would never get the selector error message.
Try adding more logs to pinpoint the location of your error or run in debug mode if it’s not too slow.
RD
I think, after adding more logs, that the exception occurs for a Click activity, and my theory now is that it might have to do with the fact that its WaitForReady is set to COMPLETE. So maybe, if the page is too slow and does not load within the timeout interval, then this is the exception that you would get? Because in that case it may make sense that the exception message is not “selector not found”.
Unfortunately it does not help if I run in debug mode, as this is not an exception occurring consistently. I have only seen it reported back after jobs in unattended mode.
I am trying to test my theory now by trying to reproduce the exception message by running a process that has a Click activity right after a new page should appear, with WaitForReady COMPLETE, and experimenting with different timeouts. I have still only been able to get exception message selector not found, so not sure if this leads anywhere…
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Hi there @tea,
Apologies if this is somewhat off-topic, but I recall a discussion with UiPath previously, wherein they stated the ‘WaitForReady’ property works inconsistenly if not within an ‘Attach Browser’.
Obviously, you may not be using a web-based application and may already be using an ‘Attach Browser’ activity, but I thought I’d mention it regardless.
As @richarddenton noted, I’ve only seen this type of exception when utilising activities without (only) selectors, such as ‘Wait Image Vanish’, ‘Click OCR Text’, etc…
Hi MrJDavey, thank you for that, my experience has also been that WaitForReady seems a little unstable. I am trying no to reproduce the exception (should my theory that it is related to WaitForReady COMPLETE be correct), so will definitely try to attach to browser for that. (The process where the error occurs uses attach to browser.)
As for what you said last, have you really seen the exception that I mention when using activities such as Wait Image Vanish? When I test such activities, all I get is “Activity timeout exceeded”. That is not the one that I am inquiring about now, which is “Timeout reached…”.
Hi there @tea,
That is an excellent point, apologies I misread what was described!
I’ve attempting to test the ‘WaitForReady’ property for this error, but cannot replicate.
I will attempt to find an example of ‘Timeout Reached…’ and let you know!
Thanks,
Josh
Thank you for that!
I have tried several times now with a Click activity inside an attach to browser, with WaitForReady COMPLETE and a really really short timeout, following another Click activity that should (and does, or at least so it looks like!)cause the page to load. I have also set the relevant Wait After and Wait Before properties to zero, so I had expected this to fail. Unfortunately it goes through without exceptions every time, which leads me to believe that WaitForReady COMPLETE doesn’t really do anything. So maybe my theory is not right anyway.
But all my logging argues that the exception really does occur at a click activity… I guess I will have to encapsule just this activity with try catch to prove it… 
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Any news on this one? I keep getting this exception every now and then, and I still am not sure what causes it. Can anyone at UiPath please tell me what this error means?
How can I change the application timeout, do you have any idea?
This is a bit weird indeed. We are getting this error intermittently with a “Type into” activity when running unattended. And it is happening only with one process even though pretty much the same module (SAP Login) is used in other processes as well. WaitForReady is set to Interactive but I don’t think it has a role in this. What I also find weird that usually if there is any type of exception that the expected element is not found there’s a very different kind of error than this “System error at initialization: Timeout reached.”
Any help in solving the cause for this would be much appreciated.
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I am having the exact same issue. I am running my robot on a VM that I am RDP’d into, and when I have that RDP window minimized, my processes fail with the Timeout Reached error. When I then bring up that RDP window, the browser (IE in this case) is open and the fields that are supposed to have the “Type Into” activity run on them, do not have any input at all.
If I keep the RDP window open and run the same process while watching the robot work, it succeeds and finishes every time without fail. Only when I run this bot under a minimized RDP session does it fail, and fail pretty consistently with Timeout Reached errors. I tried setting the WaitForReady property on the Type Into activities to NONE instead of INTERACTIVE, but no effect at all.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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So I am thinking my issue has to do with the Community Edition of UiPath not being able to run unattended bots. Maybe a bot marked as “Development” type cannot run unattended? Seems to make sense, but if someone could confirm, that would be great.
My question is what kind of activities will throw the exception message “Timeout reached…”? I am not able to reproduce this exception message, which I observe is not the exception message you get from activity wait element vanish (which is “Activity timeout exceeded”). I am working with a process that throws this exception, but I am not able to locate where it comes from.
I also find weird that usually if there is any type of exception that the expected element is not found there’s a very different kind of error than this “System error at initialization: Timeout reached.”
For a reference to anyone wondering. We were able to overcome this by designing some elements of the workflow again from scratch. UiPath support explained that “Timeout” error message comes when part of the selector is found but not the exact match. “Cannot find…” type of error on the other hand comes when there isn’t any part of the selector available.
Maybe the problem with you @acepgh is indeed a bit different in case you run the CE version and it isn’t meant to be used for unattended automation.
It seems the process stops on the Type Into activity. Basically my bot will open a browser to a login page and then type the credentials into the fields on that page. When the bot fails, the browser is open but there is no input in any of the fields, so I assume it fails at the Type Into activity.
I do believe that my problem is with the license of the Community Edition but it is difficult for me to confirm that without a license for an unattended bot in order to ensure that what I am trying to do CAN be run unattended. I have to believe it can, but it would be nice to verify.
Thanks for the response!
hi
How did you resolve this issue.
I am facing the exact issue you mentioned and could not figure out solution
The only way I don’t see this behavior is to leave the RDP window OPEN to the machine that is running the bot. Basically, if I have the RDP window and I am watching the bot activity, it works just fine. If I minimize the RDP window, then the bot no longer runs. So I just leave the RDP window while the bot is running and it seems to run fine.
Hope this solves your issue for you as well.
Hi Friends!
Try with this: Running Tests in Minimized Remote Desktop Windows | TestComplete Documentation
Regards.
Nope, that is not it for me. I’m watching the browser and watching the typing happen. I am using a Set Text inside an “Open Browser”. I am using CE so maybe that’s a clue.