I am new to UiPath and have been watching all the tutorial and playing around. I have the latest community version 2016.2.6274
I am having issues trying to select elements in PDF documents. These documents are native and do not need OCR. I can read the full document text, but I cannot use the screen scrapping method to select individual elements (it only select the full document). I have a feeling it may be something to do with the accessibility settings in adobe reader DC, I have tried going through âedit â accessibility â setup assistantâ but this didnât solve anything. I couldnât find any documentation on any settings required in adobe, was hoping someone might have a suggestion?
I tried exactly the same thing on an old laptop and it worked (using the same pdf), I compared settings and could not see anything different, apart from âaccessibility â change reading optionsâ is disabled on the new laptop (not sure if this could be an issue). Current computer is a surface pro, could the touch screen cause issues (although I canât see why).
I have tried running both UiPath and Adobe reader as admin, still no luck.
I had a play with that UIExplorer, one of the frameworks selects the whole document, the other looks a bit better in that is has smaller selection boxes, but they donât seem to match the elements on the screen. Itâs like the selection is offset from the correct position.
Could a high resolution screen or adobe settings be causing any issues?
Selecting elements on other apps seems to work fine, its just Adobe that has the issues.
I have been digging away at this issue some more without luck.
I tried it out on a surface pro 3 and it has the same issue, cannot select elements on a PDF through Adobe Reader. I have tried it on another laptop and it worked fine (second machine I have got to work). There must be something different on a Surface Pro that is causing the issue.
The one thing I noticed on the laptop the first time you try selecting an element Adobe pops up a message âAccessibility Setup Assistantâ⌠Adobe Acrobat Reader DC has detected your first user of assistive technology with⌠This pop up does not happen on the Surface Pro, but I can select it manually but it does not fix anything.
It seems this setting in Adobe âedit â accessibility â change reading optionsâ may be an issue? I found a description of this as âYou use this command if you have a third-party screen reader program installed and wish to adjust its settings. If you donât have one, this option remains grayed outâ.
Is there some screen reader that UiPath must installer to get this working? but for some reason failing on the Surface Proâs?
I did a test on the working laptop, uninstalled Adobe Reader and UiPath. Install Adobe Reader and the âchange reading optionâ is grayed out. Install UiPath, install PDF package, select element and that âchange reading optionâ is enabled⌠this is what makes me think UiPath is not installing something correctly with Adobe Reader.
Any help is much appreciated, I have had no luck working out a solution.
We have done another test, someone in our office just bought a new machine (Dell XPS 15), so a laptop with a touchscreen. The PDF data extraction is not working correctly, so it will only select the whole document, canât select individual elements.
The interesting part is this laptop has a touch screen, so we canât seem to get this working on any PC with a touch screen.
This is quite important to us, we are consultants evaluating UiPath and looking to use the product for our clients (who would purchase full edition). We canât currently demo PDF functionality.
Great timing, Iâve just been updating my previous thread with this exact same issue & noticed your post.
Weâve had the same problem with a clientâs system for weeks, but discovered only this week that their laptop is actually a dual laptop/tablet, which started us down the touch screen path.
Iâve been able to replicate the problem on another dual laptop/tablet device & unfortunately, disabling the touch screen functionality (via Device Manager) doesnât help.
Also, weâve confirmed today that this is not limited to PFD documents⌠it also impacts UiPathâs ability to identify elements on standard desktop applications.
Hopefully, thereâs some other system setting that can be modified, let see⌠@Vikas.Jain@Adrian
For most applications we use Active Accessibility to identify UI objects on the screen. This is also used for PDFs. Sometimes AA stops working on PDFs but that should not affect other applications. If this is the case you can try the following command from an elevated command line cmd.exe
regsvr32.exe oleacc.dll
It is possible that only the on-screen selection fails to properly highlight UI objects (which can happen on multiple displays with large DPIs) but identifying objects using selector could still work. To test this you can use UiExplorer and try to expand the UI tree to see if you can find UI objects in the hierarchy.
I have tried a lot of things in the past week, disabling the touch screen didnât work for me either, nor did using UiExplorer (i have only been trying this on PDFâs).
I will try the âregsvr32.exe oleacc.dllâ command when i get back to the office on Friday, i donât have my Surface Pro with me to test.
Ok, so Iâve made some interesting progress with UiExplorer, as followsâŚ
From the top menu, click UiFrameworks (last button on the right) and change the selection from âDefaultâ to âUI Automationâ⌠after making this change, I can select individual elements as expected! This works for both native PDFâs, desktop applications, etc.
The problems?
1/ It only works whilst operating out of UiExplorer, with that setting changed as per above⌠when I go back to the regular Studio interface & try to use a recorder and/or individual activities, it reverts to treating the target UI like a Citrix environment.
2/ Copying the validated selector code from UiExplorer & then pasting it into the Selector field for an activity (ie. Get Full Text) results in COM Exception.
Any thoughts?
FYI, I tried the regsvr32.exe command from an elevated command line & it didnât appear to have any impact (assuming that I did it correctly).
Also, the apps Iâve been testing are just basic Windows desktop apps - Win Explorer, Control Panel, Excel, Acrobat, etc.
Thanks for the inspect.exe tool, Iâll give that a try & report back.
I used the Highlight activity & it did identify the selector correctly⌠also used Get Text, instead of Get Full Text & it returned the value correctly!
At least thereâs some workarounds⌠I havenât needed to use UiExplorer that much up until now, but Iâd assume itâs not dramatically slower than working directly out of Studio, would that be right?
@dlp hopefully youâll need UiExplorer only in limited scenarios where the defaults generated by Studio are not enough (or when the selection is not working properly like in your case)It will be a bit slower from a usability point of view; you need to work more to get the same results that usually the recorder produce.
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