Tips for inconsistant/random errors when accessing applications UI?

We have a bot that interacts with a crm application and some of the tests we run sometimes fails on various steps when clicking controls etc. It says it can’t find the element and things like that. The next time we test it runs fine. At first we thought it had to do with us disturbing the bot with mouse movements etc but even if we leave it alone, it sometimes fails. We can see the button is there and ready to be clicked but UiPath just don’t proceed and then throw errors like “Cannot find the UI Element corresponding to…”.

Could this be glitches in UiPath, the crm application or perhaps a combination? Has anyone else experienced similar problems?

If you have any tricks to share, I’ll be all ears!

We are running the Community Studio version (2017.1.6522) on a Windows Server 2012.

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I believe it’s a combination like you mention.

I have seen some glitches where partial selectors cannot be seen when inside of a Container or the opposite where full selectors cannot be seen and a Container is needed. Most of the inconsistencies I find are from user account to user account or machine to machine where it works on one but not the other, in relation to the full versus partial selectors just glitching out.

I have not seen many issues where (using the same user account and same machine) the elements are randomly working or not. I have a feeling that sometimes the element can be seen but not interacted with causing it to skip a step and look for an element that isn’t available yet, which in that case a static delay might be necessary but not ideal.

The best tip I can give is to standardize your workflow to pull in exceptions and move to a clean state/sequence and “retry” the part of the process that failed, with maybe set a max retry variable to 3-5. This way, in the event of random occurrences, your process will attempt to retry and successfully complete your transactions. And, of course log your attempts and save screenshots.

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Thanks Clayton!