UiPath 2019 Fast Track Preview (Community Edition v2019.3.0)

2019 Fast Track Preview brings you the third charming preview release: v2019.3.0 Community Edition! :tropical_drink::beach_umbrella: :sunny:

While you’ve been busy welcoming spring into your hearts, we’ve been busy wrapping up some new features for you. We’re just going to assume you did not forget :brain: about our new release cadence: a new Community release each month and an :eye: Enterprise release twice a year!

:film_projector:Scroll down a little to check out the progress we’ve made this month in terms of scalability, security, and performance. We promise you won’t be disappointed. :star_struck:

Send all your feedback our way so we can bring you even more goodies in the future. Do this by simply creating a New Topic in the 2019 Fast Track (Preview) category and properly tag it with one of these labels: bug, suggestions, how-to, error, general-inquiry.

To make sure your Studio gets updated to the latest version, please disconnect your Robot from Orchestrator. More detailed guide can be found here.


What’s New

GIT Integration

The highly anticipated GIT Integration with Studio is here. We’re bringing you all the goodies to help clone a repository, create and manage branches, commit new project versions, and manage your work straight from Studio in a smooth way. For more details, check out the documentation.

Scalability

Update dependencies and runtime rules at once across multiple automation projects stored locally or in SVN/TFS source control repositories, using the Project Dependencies Mass Update tool available from Studio Backstage view or the command-line user interface. Once the changes are made, the modified projects can be saved locally or checked in to source control repositories. Moreover, projects can be published to Orchestrator or a custom feed. Find out more about the Project Dependencies Mass Update tool here.

File Comparison

The Compare Files feature offers the possibility to compare two similar files in the same automation project. Simply use the context menu options in the Properties panel to select the two .xaml, project.json or .txt files for comparison. Read more about this here.

Global and Project Settings

To enhance your automation experience, we’ve added Global settings: an auto backup interval, publish project timeout, output console size and minimize Studio at runtime, all detailed here.

On top of that, we’ve also incorporated Project settings for renaming a project and changing its description, as mentioned here.

Last but not least, Library properties bring the option to add a tooltip and a help link to the new activity. Read more about this here.

Troubleshooting

If you always wondered what your Unattended Robot is up to and what exactly is going on with your unsuccessful jobs, you came to the right place. This release ships with a recording functionality that helps you troubleshoot faulted jobs. Simply configure your processes to allow recording and, whenever the corresponding jobs fail, the media files illustrating the last moments of a job are at your disposal. Keep in mind that this functionality comes with a new permissions set. Please note that this feature is currently available on-premises exclusively. Click here for more information.

Security

In Orchestrator v2018.3 we introduced libraries to help you share reusable components at application level. In this release, we’ve turned our attention to segregating libraries at tenant level to ensure a more secure approach to your data. This means that in addition to the shared host feed, you may configure your libraries to use their own tenant feed.

Last but not least, the system administrator is now able to upload a library which gets propagated to all tenants which use the host feed. How cool is that? If you’re interested in reading some more about this feature and how to use it explicitly, visit our documentation.

IntelligentOCR Taxonomy Manager

The Taxonomy Manager is the next piece of the document processing puzzle, a wizard created to help you build custom taxonomy files which can then be reused across processes.

We have developed the Load Taxonomy activity, which grants you the ability to load the taxonomy created with the aid of the Taxonomy Manager wizard into a variable which can then be passed on to other activities.

Microsoft Azure Computer Vision OCR

The newly developed Microsoft Azure Computer Vision OCR engine uses the new API from Microsoft, enabling you to keep up with the evolution of technology.

Get Transaction Item by Reference

The Reference and FilterStrategy properties have been added to the Get Transaction Item activity, enabling you to filter the Transaction Item you want to retrieve by its Reference.

Improvements

Studio

Feeds for Activities Packages are now available in Studio Backstage view too, not just from the Package Manager. This way, you can adjust activity feeds even before you open a project. Find out more about this here.

When licensing Studio with an Enterprise license, the Local and Orchestrator activity feeds are enabled by default. The other default feeds, Official and Community are disabled, except for Studio Community Edition. Read more about this here.

The project’s Full Dependency Tree is now visible in the Project panel. All you need to do is expand the dependency to view sub packages and their versions. Hover over a dependency to see the requested and resolved package versions. Find more information about this here.

Favorite activities can now be marked in the Activities panel. Simply use the new Keep favorites context menu option and have all of your most used activities always visible in the panel. Check the documentation for additional info.

Info on Studio version, type of installer, device ID, license expiration and more is now available in Studio Backstage view as well. Hover over the details and get the exact date when the current Studio was released. The Update Channel continues to be found under the Help tab.

Studio also brings improvements in terms of usability and accessibility. As such, tooltips now remain persistent on hover, and a Restart button when changing the interface language and theme. Moreover, we’ve added the option to pin favorite activities to the Activities panel and always keep them visible. Learn how to access it in the documentation.

Variable and argument types part of assemblies proprietary to Studio or Robot are now hidden. This was done to ensure forward compatibility in the event of any internal changes that we may bring to these assemblies. Workflows that reference types from such assemblies should not be affected at runtime. For more details, check the documentation.

Breakpoints and debug options set during design time now persist when reopening the automation project in Studio. Read more about this here.

Orchestrator

Our dev team has been really preoccupied with improving Orchestrator’s capabilities in this release. The overall performance has been improved a great deal, especially in highly dynamic environments. Apart from that, we took care of some specific areas as well, to give you the best experience ever. See for yourself what we handled specifically:

  • To make sure there are no performance penalties in terms of license removal, we made a few changes here and there and improved the mechanism to run smoothly.

  • We’ve identified an issue that was slowing down the startup performance of Orchestrator so we made sure to optimize it even in the context of complex environments with large numbers of users.

To enhance the security of the Robot - Orchestrator communication protocol we added the possibility for the Robot to authenticate through a custom HTTP header. In this regard the web.config parameter, Scalability.SignalR.AuthenticationEnabled, is now at your disposal. Please note that if you enable this feature, also referred to as Robot SignalR authentication, you are no longer able to execute jobs on Robots with a version lower than 2018.4.3. More information is available on this page.

We know it can take a little bit for your system to get back on track after an upgrade, so in order to prevent unnecessary alerts and updates, we made it possible for you to delay the first check on your Robots’ status. Add the NotRespondingRobotsJobStartDelay parameter in web.config and configure exactly for how long you want to delay the check on your robots. Details here.

In this release, we look after power-users as well, as we provide a new web.config parameter which gives you the utmost control over roles and allows you to disable permissions from both the user interface and API. Click here for more details.

Package version management is now a breeze with our new bulk update feature. Yes, you heard that right. As of now you can update multiple processes at once in Orchestrator and it only takes a minute. Click here for more information.

To enable you to add multiple queue items at the same time from the Orchestrator API, we added a new endpoint - UiPathODataSvc.BulkAddQueueItems. If you want to see an example of such a request, please see this page.

Stacktrace information is no longer displayed in responses when making invalid requests to the Orchestrator API.

IntelligentOCR

The DegreeOfParallelism property has been added to the Digitize Document activity, enabling you to perform OCR analysis on multiple pages simultaneously. This is not a breaking change, so old workflows still function properly after updating to the latest version of the pack.

The IntelligentOCR pack is now upgraded to .NET Framework v4.6.1.

The MatchingDocumentDefinition property of the FCDocument variable has been exposed. Assigning it to a variable generates the same result as a Classify Document activity.

System

With simplification in mind, we have removed the Multiline and Singleline check boxes from the Regex Builder Wizard. No worries, as this does not cause a breaking change, because the Singleline and Multiline options are still available in the RegexOptions property field.

Computer Vision - Beta

This new version of the Computer Vision activities brings about an updated helper for the Indicate on screen functionality, which enables you to perform actions without having to use keyboard shortcuts.

UIAutomation

The v19.3.0 UIAutomation package now makes it possible to create automations in the Edge browser! Read all about it here! Oh, since this is an experimental feature, you might also want to check out the troubleshooting guide.

UI elements in XenApps are now detected even on non-standard DPI.

We’re always looking to extend your automation capabilities. As such, we have implemented support for applications which rely on the JxBrowser library. Selectors are created natively, without having to install any extensions. There are, however, a few limitations you might want to read about.

We’ve added the ability to automatically downsize images to the Google Cloud Vision OCR activity, adding a new property called ResizeToMaxLimitIfNeccesary. This has been done to make sure the size of your images does not break the maximum limit of the engine.

The Abbyy OCR activity can now be configured to use Abbyy FineReader Engine 12 via the FineReaderVersion drop-down property. Also, the PredefinedRecognitionProfile property can be used to use one of the official Abbyy recognition profiles and the CustomRecognitionProfilePath property can be used to load in your own recognition profile into the project.

User events monitoring faced an overhaul to address different issues when detecting trigger events, while also improving performance.

Setup

For those that work offline, we have some good news: you can disable the default online feeds for Robot during the deployment process. This facilitates a seamless installation process even in restrictive environments without Internet access, from the command line. For more information, access this page.

You can now configure the download location of your automation processes and their dependencies, for Studio and Robot, through the command line of the UiPathStudio.msi installer. This feature provides a customizable architecture to suit both secure deployments and hotseat scenarios. To read more about the newly added PACKAGES_FOLDER parameter and how to use it in your mass-deployment of Robots, see this page.

Moreover, you can add your own activity feeds at install-time by using UiPathStudio.msi’s command line. More information about the CUSTOM_NUGET_FEEDS argument and how to use it to set up your environment can be found here.

To ensure an even better integration between Azure and Orchestrator, it is now possible to include the local activity feed in your Azure environment directly at install-time, using the newly added activitiesPackagePath parameter. To support this feature, you should also know that we added an archive, UiPathActivities.zip, with all the activities in UiPathOrchestrator.zip. To view more information on how to use this parameter, see this page.

Furthermore, to help you control where to store Robot logs in Azure deployments, a new parameter, -robotsElasticSearchTargets, had been added to the Publish-Orchestrator.ps1 artifact. More information is available here.

UiPathPlatformInstaller.exe now also verifies if you have IIS 7.5+ and URL Rewrite installed on the machine, enabling a smooth set up process.

Known Issues

Studio

  • GIT Integration with Studio does not currently support two-factor authentication. As a workaround, use SSO authentication method with a personal token, or the basic access authentication method.

  • To merge a branch into the master of a GIT remote repository, you need to have the master branch checked out in Studio and then merge the modified branch into master.

  • Breakpoints set in an invoked workflow are ignored at debugging, unless the invoked .xaml files are opened in the Designer panel.

UIAutomation

  • The Tesseract OCR engine fails to properly read images with black borders.

Edge

  • The UiPath Edge extension needs to be installed on Windows 10 build 1803 or above. Find out more on this page.

  • The UiPath Edge extension does not work for a user on a machine if it has been already installed by a different user. Find out more on this page.

  • Processes which use the UiPath Edge extension can not be started from Orchestrator on a machine on which Edge is the default browser. Find out more on this page.

  • In Edge, web page elements are not detected if the web pages are loaded from the local machine. Find out more on this page.

JxBrowser Applications

  • For JxBrowser applications, the Recording, Data Scraping, and Screen Scraping wizards are not yet supported. Find out more on this page.

  • When automating JxBrowser applications, it is recommended to use the default framework when building selectors for JCef and Cef applications. Find out more on this page.

  • When you use the Type Into activity, be sure to enable the ClickBeforeTyping property. Find out more on this page.

Citrix

  • After you change DPI scaling levels, it is mandatory to restart your Citrix session for selectors to be accurately generated. Find out more on this page

  • In a Citrix environment, using multiple displays with different DPI can cause inaccurate detection of UI elements when the target window is moved across the displays. Find out more on this page

Bug Fixes

Studio

  • Fixed an issue that made it possible for Studio v2018.3.3 and v2018.4.4 to publish .xaml files in project subfolders with validation errors.

  • When extracting a workflow that contains an argument with a certain direction and type, Extract as Workflow keeps the argument type.

  • When connecting Studio to Orchestrator Community Edition, the label Community Edition is displayed in Studio Backstage view, the Help tab. It is recommended to disconnect Studio from Orchestrator in order to update to v2019.3.

  • Added a notification when trying to close the Manage Packages window although there are unsaved changes, like activities packages marked for installation, changed runtime rules and so on.

  • Fixed an issue that caused Studio to hang in some scenarios after saving or installing activities packages to a large .xaml file of about 10MB.

  • Fixed an issue that resulted in validation errors for certain types of variables after using Extract as Workflow.

  • Automation projects containing validation errors cannot be turned into templates using Save as Template.

  • An error message is now shown if you add a non-supported value for the Key Modifier property when using Dark theme.

  • Fixed an issue that caused a .xaml file part of a packaged library to be hidden in the Activities panel if the project contains a private file.

  • Fixed an issue that triggered an error after expanding all nodes with File Diff in a .xaml file that is larger than 8MB.

Orchestrator

  • An error was logged and Orchestrator stopped responding if you performed a POST request to the UploadLicense endpoint and provided an empty license file or the provided path was empty.

  • The performance of making POST calls to the /odata/Tenants endpoint has been improved, especially when dealing with large deployments.

  • You were not able to select a machine name on the Robot creation window after searching for it beforehand.

  • An error message was displayed when you tried to display the audit details for an action which was performed in a different organization unit.

  • Uploading a package larger than the IIS size limit now returns the following error message: "The file you’re trying to upload is too big. Please contact your administrator." Take into account that the limit is by default set to 28.6 MB.

  • You were able to upload multiple packages having the same version when using an external feed. Now an error message is displayed whenever this scenario occurs.

  • There were several issues related to importing user groups with changes in the role configuration. Similarly, administrator users’ roles were not updated if the containing user group was imported with one role only.

Activities

  • Google Cloud OCR crashed when receiving an image larger than its maximum limit.

  • Google OCR was not renamed to Tesseract OCR when used in certain activities.

UIAutomation

  • The Extract Structured Data activity did not return any data when used with Java applications v1.3 to v1.6.

  • In the SAP application menus, only the first item on the list would get recognized.

  • Fixed particular cases when the UIA selection was returning a non-UIA selector.

  • The Find Text Position activity was unable to find text that contained spaces in Internet Explorer.

  • The Text Exists, Click Text, Find Text Position, and Hover Text activities did not properly interact with particular character combinations in Internet Explorer 11.

  • In some cases, wildcard matching did not work correctly when used with Internet Explorer and other Windows 10 applications.

  • Fixed several issues which were causing selectors to not generate for UI elements when the SAP Business Client is used.

  • The Set Text activity did not work inside JTable cells with the Text role in Java applications.

  • Using the Check activity on checkboxes inside Java applications would return an error.

  • Fixed an issue which was causing the Robot Executor to stop functioning during process execution.

  • On some occasions, the Get Visible Text activity would fail and throw the Capture timeout error.

  • Additional fixes were made to improve the functionality of the Extract Data activity on tables in Java applications.

  • The Screen Scraping wizard would not return any data when used with Office 365 components.

  • The Attach Browser activity could not switch to a frameset web page tab in Internet Explorer.

  • On particular web pages, the idx=’1’ attribute in a selector would cause trigger events to be ignored by events monitoring.

  • The Type Into activity was unable to type particular characters.

Setup

  • To ensure a smooth experience in offline environments, the list of activity dependencies has been updated in all our installers. Please note that as a result, the size of the artifacts has increased.

  • An error message was displayed if you closed the UiPathPlatformInstaller.exe wizard while the installation process was being executed.

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 - v19.3.0

  • UiPath.UIAutomation.Activities - v19.3.0

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

24 Likes

Wow :star_struck: awesome UiPath Team Rocking :clap: :clap: seeing lot of new updates compared to previous one.

4 Likes

A lot many. Looking forward to check these features.
Congrats to the team.

Regards,
Karthik Byggari

1 Like

Many features to look forward too :smiley: Any clue on when this will be released in the enterprise version?

1 Like

Hi @nbjerke

See here for hints :slight_smile:

Awesome :clap::clap: Congratulations to the UiPath Team :heart_eyes::clap:
Looking forward for the new features :wink:

OS : Windows 10

UiPath Studio : 2019.03

Activity :

image

Error when using CV scoping activity since I moved to 2019.03

Hi @albel

What is your currently installed version of the package UiAutomation? Could you try upgrading it to 19.3.0?

HI @loginerror

the version 19.3.0 was already installed. Even I removed it and then reinstalled it, the issue still there.
The error is happening when I’m trying to scope the CV before using its activities.

image

Awesome job UI Path team! :clap::clap: Looking forward to trying GIT version control on my projects

2 Likes

Hi @albel,

Can you try installing the UiPath.Vision package to version 1.4.0?

Hi @florinszilagyi
Actually, version 1.4.0 is already installed and I’m up-to-date in all the others packages. And this happened since I moved from version 1.3.0

Finally I found where the problem is coming from :
image

if I upgrade UiAutomation and Vision package it goes wrong. I tried to just downgrade one of them each time but seems that is not working. with respectively version 19.2.0 and 1.3.0 it works ! So I guess that the issue is at UiPath side. There is a conflict somewhere in the assemblies.

Are there any examples or sample files for the Intelligent OCR activities? Do I need an ABBYY FlexiCapture license to use all/most of the activities in this package? I was able to create a Document Type in the Taxonomy Manager but not sure how to use that Taxonomy file to train/classify/extract documents?

  • Do we have any expected date of release for this edition (for both Community and Enterprise) ?
  • Can we have Beta in Enterprise edition as well?

Hello @cvent978 - we’re working on a sample workflow showcasing on the functionalities, I’ll keep you posted on when that’s available

3 Likes

Great news, thanks Ioana.

I had the same problem, but I needed to stay with nuget.exe 2.8 due to not being able to upgrade the version of .NET Framework installed on our build server (2.8 is the last version that still works with .NET 4.0).

The cause turned out to be having nuget.config only pointing to the v3 API. The solution is to add in the v2 API. For example,UIPath Course Unable to access