Fix broken XAML files after downgrading UiPath.UIAutomation.Activities

[cprima]

Had to downgrade UiPath.UIAutomation.Activities (from
25.10 to 24.10) and was in pain: Studio refused to open the
workflows. Every file that was created with the newer package was broken.

The error messages look like this:

Failed to create a 'Version' from the text 'V5'.

or files simply fail to load:

Error ERROR Validation Error Cannot set unknown member 'UiPath.UIAutomationNext.Activities.NApplicationCard.HealingAgentBehavior'. RnD/Scratch_Foo.xaml

What breaks

UiPath Studio serialises each UI automation activity into XAML with a Version attribute that tracks the element schema:

<uix:NTypeInto ClipboardMode="Never" Version="V5" ... />

When you downgrade, the version enum in the older package is smaller. If NActivityVersion in 24.10 only defines V1..V4, Studio can’t parse V5 and gives up.

Three kinds of breakage

1. Version too high – the element’s Version="V5" exceeds what the target dependency supports. Must be capped to the max valid version.

2. Version-gated attributes – attributes introduced alongside a version bump. ClipboardMode on NTypeInto was added at V5. When capping to V4 it must also be stripped, or Studio still rejects the element.

3. Globally unknown attributes – attributes the older dependency doesn’t know at any version. HealingAgentBehavior was added in 25.10 and must be removed unconditionally.

Manually editing these out of dozens of files with hundreds of occurrences is not realistic.

Automated fix

I wrote a small Python script that fixes this automatically. It
processes XAML files with regex (no XML parsing), so formatting is preserved exactly. Dry-run by default, idempotent, and uses uv for zero-dependency setup.

uv run fix-uia-xaml --root /path/to/uipath/project

It’s available as a gist:
https://gist.github.com/cprima/87e68d4732170820e71eafb44255efc0

Please consider to star the gist as this is the only tangible metric that motivates me to share more from my trove of helpers.

The element catalog currently covers the 25.10 → 24.10 downgrade but is designed to be extended for other version combinations. Contributions welcome.

Hope this saves someone else a few hours.
However, editing .xaml files directly is not a vendor supported way. I started the exploration and wrote the fix in a throwaway branch.