UiPath 2019 Fast Track Preview (Community Edition v2019.2.0)

News Release Notes
1

2019 Fast Track Preview presents a brand new preview release: v2019.2.0 Community Edition! :heart::heart:

Hope you didn’t forget about the new release cadence, did you? Let’s refresh your memory: starting with 2019, a new Community release is launched monthly such that you are the first contact with our latest features, improvements and bug fixes. :white_flower:Twice a year, the Enterprise release comes into play to step-up the game.

This release continues to advance overall performance, usability, and flexibility, with significant progress on multiple ends. For details concerning the above goodies :fortune_cookie: , and some other treats :cookie:, scroll down and check the release notes!

If there’s anything you would like us to know simply create a New Topic in the 2019 Fast Track (Preview) category and tag it accordingly using one of the following labels: bug, suggestions, how-to, error, general-inquiry.

What’s New

File Change Management

Comparing changes between a process, library, project.json or .txt file in a local repository and the latest version from SVN or TFS is done using File Diff in Studio. It shows a side-by-side comparison between the two files, highlighting added or removed activities, packages, variables, arguments. Read more about File Diff here.

Extensibility and Performance

Continuing on what we previously delivered for a faster and more performant sync for all types of packages, we are extending the list of possibilities when it comes to blob storages. You can configure your Orchestrator instance to keep them in Amazon or Minio. For more information on how to set it up, access this page.

Coinciding with this release, there are some new additions to Orchestrator’s logging solution. As of now, Orchestrator Robot logs can be stored and viewed using the Cosmos DB service. Since Cosmos DB implements the same wire protocols for a number of NoSQL APIs, you may also connect to MongoDB using the same NLog target. See here details about the logging configuration in Orchestrator.

Improvements

Studio

Select one or multiple variables or arguments from the panel and copy them to another workflow. The name, type, and default value of variables or arguments is also copied.

One or multiple variables can now be converted to arguments and the other way around from the panel context menu.

Studio now adapts to the Windows setting and switches to High Contrast mode with a simple restart, so you no longer have to enable the mode from the Settings tab.

We’ve added keyboard shortcuts for creating both In and Out arguments. Check this page for an extended list of keyboard shortcuts in Studio.

Robot

If you feel that your Robot needs a change, then try it in the Dark Theme. It still executes your processes as before, but now in a fashionable manner. The theme can be changed from the User Preferences window.

Orchestrator configuration options and Robot logging are now set from the Orchestrator Settings window, while the language, theme, and global keyboard shortcuts are configured from the User Preferences window.

Get your Citrix machines quickly ready for automation! It’s now possible to install the Java Bridge and the Chrome Extension from the UiPathRemoteRuntime.msi installer, or through silent deployment from the Command Prompt. Find out how it’s done on this page.

UIAutomation

The new Context Aware Anchor has been created by building upon the old Anchor Base activity. To increase precision, it now takes into account the pairs of anchors and targets, without requiring an anchor to be unique.

The Google OCR, Google Cloud OCR, and Microsoft Cloud OCR engine activities have been renamed to Tesseract OCR, Google Cloud Vision OCR, and Microsoft Project Oxford Online OCR, respectively. Don’t worry, as this does not cause a breaking change to your already existing workflows!

The Extract Structured Data activity has two new properties that enable you to choose what kind of click you want to use when changing pages if the data you want to extract spans multiple pages.

Apart from the v19.2.0 UIAutomation package, we are also giving you a first hand look at the v19.2.1-beta UIAutomation package. It greatly increases the functionality of the events monitoring, enhances support on platforms such as SAP, Java, Silverlight, while also improving stability of trigger events like click and keyboard controls. Since it’s not yet fully ready for production workflows, we encourage you to try it out and provide feedback to help us make it even better! Grab it now from the Beta Feed in the Package Manager, and leave any thoughts on our 2019 FastTrack Preview forum page.

AI Computer Vision

All that time and resources invested into research have finally paid off, as we have a new UiPath.AI.ComputerVision v.1.0.0-beta activities pack which was built using our in-house developed Computer Vision neural network. Using Machine Learning algorithms, this pack makes the most used UI Automation activities even better by enabling them to recognize UI elements at a glance! Please note this is a beta release, which means you can only download the activity package from the Beta feed. For more information, please go here.

System

We have developed a RegEx Builder wizard which gives you the ability to harness the power of Regular Expressions with a simple and easy to use UI. This wizard can be accessed from the body of the IsMatch, Matches, and Replace activities.

The Orchestrator HTTP Request activity has been improved, and is now able to retrieve the headers of the requests it performs.

Web

The HTTP Request and Soap Request activities have been improved, and are now able to retrieve the headers of the requests they perform.

IntelligentOCR

The IntelligentOCR pack has been upgraded with some new activities that enable you to perform document classification. These activities are:

Orchestrator

For an extra layer of security in the connection between Orchestrator, Robot, and Studio, the authentication method has been updated to use a bearer token. For more information, check this page.

To aid you in efficiently managing the manual upload of automation packages through the user interface, Orchestrator now enables you to select and transfer multiple archives at a time.

Several enhancements have been made to the /odata/Tenants endpoint. The DisplayName and Key properties have been exposed to help you pin-point your tenants in an easier fashion, with just a simple GET call. Secondly, you can now perform PATCH requests at the /odata/Tenants(Id) endpoint, to modify the DisplayName and AcceptedDomainsList properties.

It is now possible to perform PATCH requests on the /odata/Robots(Id) endpoint, so that you can easily change certain details about a specific Robot without needing to know its password and username.

To aid you in silently updating your Orchestrator instance and using the previous database, the APP_ENCRYPTION_KEY parameter of the UiPathOrchestrator.msi installer has been enhanced. More details are available in the guide.

The Webhooks page can now be filtered according to a webhooks’ state - enabled or disabled.

To ease the management of large deployments, the Robots page can now be filtered by an environment with just a click.

Breaking Changes

Activities

  • Fixed an issue which caused the Excel Read Row activity to retrieve incomplete information from workbooks. As a result, retrieved rows now include the empty cells they contain.

Orchestrator

  • The Username parameter is now mandatory for PUT requests on the /odata/Robots(Id) endpoint.

Known Issues

Studio

  • If you make changes to activity properties, File Diff might not display all the modifications in the Modified Properties panel.

  • Expanding all nodes with File Diff triggers an error if the .xaml file is larger than 8MB.

  • If you create a workflow containing an argument with a certain direction and type, using Extract as Workflow changes the argument type.

Orchestrator

  • Our Swagger documentation does not enable you to upload multiple archives through POST requests to the /odata/Processes/UiPath.Server.Configuration.OData.UploadPackage endpoint. Please note that this is possible at the API level and it is just a Swagger limitation at the moment.

  • A user without View permissions on Schedules is able to see schedule-related alerts.

  • An error message is displayed when you try to upload a number of at least 10 packages to Orchestrator if some of them already exist.

Activities

  • In order to install the UiPath.AI.ComputerVision.Activities package as a dependency for a new project, you must first uninstall the UiPath.UIAutomation.Activities package and then reinstall it alongside the UiPath.AI.ComputerVision.Activities pack.

  • Images that are 4K resolution are not yet supported by the Computer Vision activities.

  • Typing in the second input box after a label usually fails when using the Computer Vision activities.

  • Performing actions in tables or grids is not yet fully supported when using the Computer Vision activities.

  • Microsoft Edge has some flickering issues when used with the Computer Vision activities.

Bug Fixes

Studio

  • The properties of the last executed activity were not displayed in the Locals panel after using Step Over while debugging.

  • Fixed an issue that caused text to be cut off in the Locals panel.

  • If during the installation of a dependency the package gets corrupted, then the installation doesn’t complete and a few additional steps are required. Read more about this here.

  • Fixed an issue that caused certain hotkeys to be improperly enabled while the Publish Project window was opened.

  • Studio stopped responding and had to be restarted when you attempted to install a faulty dependency. Now, an error message is thrown.

Robot

  • The Pack command would return an error if the required dependencies were not available locally or in the NuGet download folder.

  • Executing a process through the -f command did not use the Orchestrator activity feed.

Orchestrator

  • An error message is now displayed if you create a webhook with a target URL whose SSL certificate cannot be verified.

  • Uninstalling Orchestrator now removes the entire contents of the Activities folder, even if it contains custom files.

  • Fixes an issue that prevented UiPathOrchestrator.msi from preserving your custom location, website and application pool names. Starting with v2019.2.0, all future updates of Orchestrator keep your previous custom values.

  • The body of GET requests to the /odata/Robots/UiPath.Server.Configuration.OData.GetUsernames() endpoint did not include the @odata.count annotation in the response.

  • It was possible to perform requests on the /odata/QueueDefinitions endpoint without specifying the Id of an organization unit, although units were enabled on your Orchestrator instance.

  • It was possible to input invalid URLs in PATCH requests to the /odata/Webhooks(Id) endpoint. Now, proper validation is assured.

  • Occasionally, due to deadlocks in the database, Robots stopped executing jobs, despite being available.

  • An error message was displayed when you tried to edit the parameters of a process immediately after changing its version.

  • Switching between organization units on the Robots page caused the Machine filter to be removed.

  • You were not warned that changing the current user password logs you out of the active session.

  • An error message was displayed when you changed the password of the system administrator for the first time after a clean Orchestrator installation.

  • Occasionally, when creating a duplicate Robot using the Create Another feature, no radio options on the Settings tab were saved from the first configuration.

  • Alerts were displayed with a delay of several minutes after being generated.

  • An error message was seldom displayed when you refreshed the License page for both the Attended and Unattended scenarios.

  • The Latest button on the View Process window did not work correctly for semantic package versions if you used an external feed. Under the exact same conditions, for processes set to use older versions, the corresponding icon was not updated accordingly.

  • An error message was displayed when you tried to create a Robot on a previously defined machine. This only occurred in the context of a poorly performing internet connection.

  • Changing the tenant timezone caused a one-day discrepancy between the dates on the License Usage graph.

  • An error message was displayed when you tried to search for a value on the Robots page. This only occurred in the context of a large Robot deployment.

Activities

  • Fixed an issue which caused the Click Trigger, Click Image Trigger, and Key Press Trigger activities to crash when using certain applications.

  • When importing arguments in the Invoke Workflow File activity, the names of the values were imported but the values were left empty.

  • Using the Read PDF With OCR activity with the Google OCR engine threw an error.

  • In certain situations, Excel Workbooks were closed during the execution of an automation project.

  • Fixed an issue which caused the Process Document activity to crash when processing documents that contained check boxes.

  • Certain types of .pdf files caused the Digitize Document activity to throw errors.

  • Certain types of .jpg files caused the Digitize Document activity to throw errors.

  • In certain circumstances, editing a table with confidence below 100% and making no changes to it modified the confidence to 100%.

  • Fixed an issue which caused the Extract manual token as reference for this field button to remain disabled.

Activities Versions

The following activity packages and versions are included in the installers and are added as dependencies, by default, to a newly created project in Studio:

  • UiPath.Excel.Activities - v2.5.2

  • UiPath.Mail.Activities - v1.3.0

  • UiPath.System.Activities - v19.2.0

  • UiPath.UIAutomation.Activities - v19.2.0

See below for all release notes for UiPath 2019 Fast Track Preview:

31 Likes
6

Good job UiPath Team :slight_smile::clap::ok_hand:

Official release date?

Regards,
Arivu :slight_smile:

1 Like
7

Enterprise 19.4. will contain all the goodies from the community releases.

3 Likes
8

The number of changes in this release is impressive! :vulcan_salute:

4 Likes
9

Try them out and let us know what you think @sreenivasm :wink:

3 Likes
10

@ovi - Is it released already? Where can I download this preview version?

1 Like
11

Wow. Ready to explore the new activities and new version. :slight_smile:

12

Congratulations to the entire team who worked on this and excited to explore the new features :slight_smile:

13

Hi @sreenivasm

All you need to do is restart your Studio :slight_smile: And in case you have a robot connected to our Orchestrator CE, disconnect it first, then restart Studio, then wait 2 minutes and restart it again and you should be on 2019.2.0 :slight_smile:

14

Absolutely love this! :heart:

The turn around time between noticing a missing feature / feature improvement is impressive! I made a post about the conversion of variables to arguments and vice versa just the other week and already it’s in there.

You’re making it very difficult not to fall for UiPath :wink:

5 Likes
15

Awesome team UiPath :clap:t2::clap:t2::clap:t2:

really you don’t have the rest ? (I am kidding) :kissing_heart::relaxed:

2 Likes
16

Great job, waiting for the AI vision finally in the ground. Excited to see and use

Balram

17

Hi @balramrv! You can check the AI Computer Vision activity pack in Beta here:

3 Likes
18

Congratulations to the whole team for this new version !! Looking forward to testing these new features, especially the AI Computer Vision :slight_smile:

19

Seems very exciting

21

Very nice news :relaxed:

22

Hi,

“Soap Request” activity still gets Method ‘xxxxxx’ not found exception. Could you pls check?

24

Regarding File Diff, can it be used to compare XML files which are not UiPath specific. For example- can I compare an XML file which had lets say patient data and next day a change happened with that XML. Can I compare these 2 XML files using this feature?

25

If I wanted to save the changes to the workflow, ‘Ctrl+S’ keyboard shortcut was not working.