Navigate To Activity is unreliable in Unattended Mode

I have come to observe that the Navigate to Activity does not work reliably in the Unattended mode. I test the Automation in Studio and it works. But when triggered as an Unattended Automation from Assistant, the Navigate To activity fails to recognize the parent window 2 out of 4 times!

I am using the Edge Browser to run the automation.

I am not sure what is the approach to debug this. Here is the package stack and how this activity has been configured.

In the second picture, the Browser App reference is passed to the flow from a previous flow that uses the Open Browser activity to login to the Web application and return the Browser app reference.

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@AndyMenon
Not sure, but can you give it a try and see if it works for you.

It is not specific to chrome but to all browsers

Hello @Lakshay_Verma ,

Thanks for the lead. I will pursue this although I don’t know if I can release an automation to production with a preview* version of an activity.

Will post updates either ways.

Cheers!

@AndyMenon

Please do let us know if the latest 21.4 version fixes the issue for you.

Quick question - does the behaviour always occurs on specific URLs that you navigate to (2/4 times, always on the same URLs)?

1 Like

Hi @loginerror,

The problem has aggravated with 21.4-preview. It is now happening when I run the automation from Studio as well. Issue is it works in Debug mode, but not when using the Run functionality.

Again, of the 4 times I ran it failed 2 times. I am rolling back to 21.2 to see if it makes any difference.

Yes, it is the same URL that I’m navigating to, but from different parts of the process. This is how the application roughly works:

  1. Login to the web application
  2. Navigate to URL1 to get latest job status :point_left: - fails here sometimes
  3. If job has completed, navigate to URL2 that automatically triggers a new job (Works great!)
  4. Navigate back to URL1 to pull up the list of jobs again :point_left: - fails here sometimes
  5. Fetch the ID of the newly triggered job
  6. Log out

Not sure if this helps but:

The Navigate To actions at 2 and 4 above are used within a flow and invoked in the main flow.
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But the one at 3 that always works is used directly in the main flow.
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This is the only contextual difference between the two. Other than that, all Navigate To actions use the Browser Application reference to perform the Navigate Action.