New Action Center on Automation Cloud is GA now

[Liji (Liji Kunnath)]

New Action Center on Automation Cloud is GA now

We are happy to announce the General Availability of brand new Action Center on Automation Cloud!
We value every feedback provided by our community members during the preview, helping us to make our product offerings better

Note Starting March 1st 2021, Actions UI within Orchestrator will be unavailable across enterprise and community Automation cloud accounts . It is highly recommended to route your users to a much easily accessible, revamped Actions interface right on the left rail of your organization’s Automation cloud account.

On-premise Orchestrator will continue to have Actions user interface supported in our next platform release 21.4 as well. However, we plan to disable the Orchestrator Actions UI in our next LTS in Q4 2021 and we suggest that our on-premise customers take benefit of the stand alone Action Center portal that we released in 20.10 as early as possible, thus on-boarding your business users to an improved user experience.

Recap of what’s new with this version of Action Center

Presenting a brand-new user interface outside of Orchestrator, making it intuitive for business users to login to a dedicated Action Center application to handle actionable items that Robots are waiting on.

Action Center offering now enables business users to submit business data and trigger un-attended Robots through form-based input or file upload. A brand-new option “Processes” added for users who would like to trigger automations from web interface

Summary of features added since our last major release apart from our new user interface

• Actions are supported in modern folders. Actions generated from a process can be routed to different folders (departments or teams) through Orchestrator Folder Path attribute in persistence activities.

• Task Object returned from ‘Create Form Task’ now contains additional task meta-data (assigned to user, last modified users, last modified time, etc.)

• Studio > Project settings > ‘Support persistence’ flag can be used to enable persistence activities in any process type.

• Ability for business users to trigger un-attended processes through forms (including file upload) and track processes triggered by them

• New Document understanding specific Action types available in Action Center application (Document validation, Document classification)

• Additional controls in forms like storage bucket-based images, dynamic and cascaded dropdowns, content control

• Ability to add file attachments to actions

• PDF Viewer support in Action Forms

• Action forms intermediate Save

• Javascript expressions support in actions based forms for advanced conditions and validations logic

New capabilities

Let’s glance through the new capabilities added since our last preview update until now.

Document Understanding Action types are enabled in the new Actions app

Refer to documentation
Document Classification Action
Document Validation Action

Attachment support in Action Forms

Business users can now upload file(s) to an Action form (backed up storage buckets), very crucial while automating agent verification scenarios.
RPA developers can configure whether to accept single or multiple file(s) in a form field and the maximum file size supported per upload through form designer properties.

Embedding PDFs to Action forms possible now with the support for PDF viewer

PDF files can be uploaded to storage buckets and referred directly in an HTML Element control, saves effort in conversion of PDFs to images for embedding in forms.

Action forms now supports basic JavaScript expressions

RPA developers can use basic JavaScript expressions in Action Forms for advanced validations and conditions. This is a safe-eval version of JavaScript, hence not exposing DOM APIs (in-turn objects like fetch, window, browser, etc are not exposed ).

Intermediate save in Actions Forms

Business users does not have to enter data at a stretch before completing an Action

Download Actions meta-data in CSV

Enables download of Action information for the current filter applied in a CSV format

Trigger un-attended processes through file upload

Process forms in Action Center can now present file upload control and trigger processes through file upload (Queues and Jobs)

Missed our earlier posts on Action Center features?

Preview Announcement

Feature updates during the preview

Sample workflows to demonstrate new features

• Workflow to accept attachment as part of Action Forms

  Storage_Sample_actions_attachments.zip (135.8 KB)

  Developer info:

  • Pass argument of data type ‘ StorageUploads ’ in the form data, map this fieldkey to ‘File’ component under advance controls section in the form designer
  • Developer can define properties to control allow upload of single or multiple files as well as min and max limit of file size that could be uploaded during design time
    This workflow uses bucket name ‘ActionsTest’

• PDF Viewer support in Action Forms

  Storage_Sample_PDF_Viewer.zip (1.4 MB)

  Developer info:

  • PDF to be uploaded to storage bucket using storage bucket activities (this sample workflow uses storage bucket with name ‘ActionsTest’).
  • Pass the uploaded file path to form data through an attribute name with suffix _ storage (eg. Pdf_storage)
  • Refer the attribute name (eg. pdf_storage ) in the HTML Element control with tag. Example <embed src={{ data.pdf_storage }} width=“600px” height=“500px”>
  • Do not check ‘RefreshOnChange’ property.

  Go to Edit Json, search for ‘RefreshOn’ and set value to the form data attribute “eg. pdf_storage’ and SAVE

• Javascript expressions support in Action Forms

  JS Expressions_in_Actions.zip (4.8 KB)

  Developer info:

  • In the property of a form element, go to Logic tab, then add ‘Advanced Logic ’ and select JavaScript for writing required JavaScript expressions for data validations and advanced conditions
  • This JavaScript interpreter does not support DOM APIs, hence none of the objects like fetch, window, browser, etc are exposed.

• Trigger un-attended process with file upload (Through Queue schema)

  Relocation Expenses_Queue_File_Upload.zip (44.5 KB)

  Developer info:

  • Suffix the keyword _storage for an argument or schema property to show file upload control. There has to be mandatory parameter ‘BucketName’ to provide storage bucket where these files have to be uploaded to
  • RelocationInvoice_QueueSchema.JSON in this workflow zip Relocation Expenses_Queue_File_Upload includes the properties ’ UserFile_storage ’ & ’ BucketName ’ that enables to render a form with File Upload control
  • Provide the value for BucketName in the ‘Default Value’ of Queue schema

  This workflow uses bucket name ‘ActionsTest’

Have some feedback or feature requests ?

Do write to us here.

[JokerBot (Mohammad)]

@Liji Hi Liji,
There seems to be an error on the “PDF Viewer” tab of the form and it doesn’t show the file on the form. Here is the message I get:

would you mind providing advice on how to fix this?

[Liji (Liji Kunnath)]

Hi Mohammad @JokerBot
This format error shown in the design time content canvas can be ignored as it does not impact runtime forms rendering of PDFs or any storage bucket based objects.
Where are you viewing the Actions forms? From Actions left rail in Automation cloud or Actions with in Orchestrator ? All the features listed here are specifically added in the standalone Action Center portal (comprising of Actions and Processes) outside of Orchestrator UI. On cloud, you could directly access ‘Actions’ from home page of Automation cloud. In case of on-prem, please refer to this 2020.10 on how to install standalone action center portal (internally pointing to an existing Orchestrator instance)

You would see a flickering of PDF element in the above workflow which can be fixed by following the steps that I mentioned in the developer notes (Setting refreshOn and not setting RefreshOnChange). I am attaching an updated workflow here with this small change, but the format error in the Content canvas as originally raised by you can be ignored and not a reason for PDF not rendering)Storage_Sample_no_flicker.zip (1.4 MB)

Please let me know if you cannot get it work on the ‘Actions’ UI right from Automation Cloud

[davendra.patel]

Hi

Trying name the bucket name which is in a folder in Cloud. But the schema cannot find it and get a error message

Any help appreciated.

Regards
Davendra

[davendra.patel]

Hi

I’ve manage to fix it.

The “myinvoice_bucket” is being used by DU Classification/Extraction.

So I was trying to use this but not allowing me todo this…

So I just created a new bucket and worked fine.

“BucketName”: {

        "$id": "#/properties/BucketName",

        "type": "string",

        "title": "BucketName",

        "default": "MyNewInvoiceBucket",

        "examples": [

            "User FileName"

        ]

    },

All good

[rajeev.ranjan]

@davendra.patel
I noticed you are providing bucket folder path joined with bucket name itself.
You need to add bucket folder path separately.

    "BucketFolderPath": {
        "$id": "#/properties/BucketFolderPath",
        "type": "string",
        "title": "The BucketFolderPath schema",
        "description": "Folder path of the bucket.",
        "default": "invoices",
        "examples": [
                ""
        ]
    }

[davendra.patel]

Thank you ! This will also help.

[davendra.patel]

Hi

Is it possible to uploaded multiple files rather than single files?

Thanks
Davendra

[athiraanand (Athira)]

Once we upload file from action center , where is getting actually stored ??
Is it the same machine where the orchestrator is installed ?? @Liji

[Liji (Liji Kunnath)]

Storage bucket as configured for that Task (if it is from Actions form) or process (if it is from process trigger form)

[athiraanand (Athira)]

thanks for the quick response !!

the storage bucket will be pointed to a local drive or it is in cloud?

[Liji (Liji Kunnath)]

Probably these two links could help(how to do it and where it gets stored), its completely customers choice

About Storage Buckets

Advanced Controls in the Form Designer

[dfda975]

Dear UiPath Team,

What might be the reason for the PDF Viewer not working in Actions Form - the viewer from the example at the beginning of this thread just won’t run (not visible) in Orchestrator Enterprise (on-premise), although it works fine in the Community Edition (cloud).
Also an interesting feature is the inaccessibility of JSON and HTML Content nested editors in Form Designer.

Any help or ideas would be appreciated.

Ochestrator version is 2020.12
Studio is 2021.4.3.

Thank you in advance.

[Liji (Liji Kunnath)]

Hi @dfda975 , All these new features are available in the stand alone Action Center portal available from 2020.10 onwards.

Introduction

Installation

[dfda975]

Thank you Liji Kunnath for the prompt and detailed answer.

Should we license Action Center as additional component or it just replaces existed Action Tab in Orchestrator?

Thank you in advance.

[Liji (Liji Kunnath)]

Hi , Actions within Orchestrator as well has been a licensed feature for on-boarding business users - see here Introduction (available as user licenses starting with an entry level Action Center license, and it is included in all the above user licenses like automation developer, attended user etc, your UiPath account team should be able to guide you on this). Please note that we have not done license enforcements in the product yet & this technical limitation will be removed in a future release, so it is a trust based solution today .
There is no change in licensing from Actions UI within Orchestrator Vs standalone Action Center portal. All your current Actions will be automatically reflected in the standalone portal as well.

[dfda975]

Dear Liji Kunnath,

Thank you for the reply!

Could you also clarify why in Enterprise Studio 2021.4.3. are unavailable embedded Editors for JSON and Content HTML Section (see attached screenshot)?