2019 Preview brings you the second iteration of our soon-to-be LTS: v2019.6.0 Community Edition!
Please choose our Community Cloud account to download your Studio Community .exe installer. You will find it under Resources tab.
What’s New
Studio UI Redesign
Improving functionality is key to delivering a competitive product, but we must admit that UI/UX factors also play a central part in making automation smoother for our users. Thus, this version of Studio brings a redesign in terms of icons and dialogs, a slimmer ribbon and simplified design space. In this regard, the Quick Access Toolbar has been removed, opening up more space for creating and troubleshooting projects. You can check out these changes in the documentation.
Productivity
Support for C# is now available for processes in Studio. This means that you can choose between C# and Visual Basic when creating a process, and use C# expressions in activities to build your project. Make sure to check the documentation for more, and please keep in mind that this is currently an Experimental feature.
Debugging
Use Step Out to move out of the current parent container in debug. The action steps out from the current container after its last activity is executed. The focus is set at the level of the current container. Find out how to use this debugging feature from the documentation.
Conditional Breakpoints can be set so that the project execution stops if the condition is met. Such breakpoints can be managed from the Breakpoints panel. Find more info here.
The Run to this Activity context menu option helps with debugging the process and then pausing before the activity is executed. The option is available when debugging is paused. Read more about this option here.
Activities
A clear and organized working environment is the key to success. Keeping this in mind, we have created two new, separate activities, Train Classifiers Scope and Train Extractors Scope, that can help you stay focused.
The new Invoke Process activity enables you to begin the execution of any process that is present on the machine you are working on directly from your current workflow.
The recently developed Multiple Assign activity helps you clear the clutter in your workflows by letting you use a single activity for multiple assign actions.
Improvements
Studio
The Locals panel has been rearranged to differentiate between variables, and the properties belonging to the previously executed activity. Properties and variables can be filtered by name, type, or value. Read more about the improvements to the Locals panel here.
The Command Palette incorporates the Universal Search, and the Add Activity search bars. The latter is used for searching, and adding activities directly to the file opened in Studio. Check out more info here.
When saving a flowchart which contains multiple activities, the focus is preserved, and no longer jumps to the top of the flowchart.
Searching in the Activities, Project panels, and Command Palette is now easier after we’ve implemented fuzzy search. Read more about this here.
The Copy to GIT shortcut is now available in the Studio status bar allowing you to copy the current project to an existing GIT repository with the click of a button. Since the status bar now accommodates all shortcuts for connecting to a GIT, TFS or SVN repository, we have also removed the Team shortcut in the Project to offer you a cleaner UI. Check it out here.
Studio now remembers previous preferences in terms of checking out versioned files by simply selecting a checkbox in the source control prompt window. This is detailed in the documentation here and here.
When creating variables or arguments directly from the properties of an activity, the custom namespaces containing the type used as generic are automatically imported. Previously, the namespaces needed to be imported from the Imports panel.
Robot
A confirmation dialog now shows up when you remove an Orchestrator URL from the Robot Orchestrator Settings window.
From now on, only the Package name is displayed in the Robot Tray.
Orchestrator
We made several improvements to Orchestrator’s logging solution. Specifically:
- The Elasticsearch NLog target now supports a static connection pool apart from a single-noded one, thus enabling you to interact with multiple Elasticsearch URLs, all defined in the same target. Details here.
- We upgraded the Elasticsearch client we were using. As of now Orchestrator uses NEST v6.6.0.
- Last but not least, we improved Elasticsearch performance by logging to the same index for all tenants, instead of using a unique index for each tenant. Details here.
In this release, our designers flicked some visual changes in Orchestrator. Oh and some cool animations about the place. And you can now sync your Orchestrator look with your operating system display settings. This last one is only available in Firefox and Safari for now. Sorry about that. More details about these beauties here.
The last enterprise release brought you the possibility to add queue items into your Orchestrator instance directly from a .csv file. In this release we made sure the action is properly audited. More details about audit here.
We made configuring your email alerts easier, adding the functionality to test and validate your settings before applying them. For more details, see here.
Activities
In DocumentProcessing.Contracts.Training, the list of constructors has been updated and a new property has been added, FieldType. New interfaces and classes have been added for supporting the newly created activities, Train Classifiers Scope and Train Extractions Scope. More details about the new activities can be found here and here.
A new property has been added to the Results Data Point Class public class. You can now select the FieldType and specify the type of the field, as defined in the taxonomy.
A new property has been added to the Data Extraction Scope activity. You now can select the FormatValuesIfPossible check box for the Data Extraction Scope activity to compute only the values that don’t have any derived parts. More details here.
UIAutomation
We’re glad to introduce support for web and native applications exposed through the Microsoft App-V virtualization technology. Selectors are now natively generated for the applications exposed through this virtualization solution.
Interactive selection for the Microsoft Office suite now generates UIA selectors by default instead of AA. This considerably improves generating selectors, especially for the Slide Panel and Main Body in PowerPoint, and various Excel elements.
Several improvements were made regarding element detection in SAP. On the one hand, item selection for SAP GUI Table Controls is now possible with multiple activities, such as Select Item, Select Multiple Items, Click, Highlight, and more. On the other hand, it’s now possible to generate selectors for SAP list trees.
Native selectors can now be generated for applications running on JRE and JDK 9, 10, 11, and 12.
Known Issues
Robot
- Process execution experiences a slight increase in duration on Community Edition versions 2018.4 and above. You can find out more details in our troubleshooting guide.
Studio
-
During debug, only first level properties of activities from web service libraries are displayed in the Locals panel.
-
Namespaces from web service libraries are not automatically imported when creating a variable. In the Variables panel, browse for the needed data type, or add an activity that uses this particular data type, and create an inline variable.
-
Arguments are not renamed in all project occurrences if the argument type is
UiElement.
Orchestrator
- It is not possible to directly upgrade from
v2017.1.6435
tov2019.6
or later. To do so, you must first upgrade tov2019.4
.
UIAutomation
- Selectors for the Add new sheet button in Microsoft Excel 2016 can not be generated. This is because the object is not exposed via the Active Accessibility or the UIAutomation framework.
App-V
- The Java extension can not be installed for App-V Java applications which are virtualized in the JRE. Read more about this in the Troubleshooting Guide.
Java
- Detection of UI elements in Java 9+ applications on Windows Enterprise editions is faulty. Find out more in the Java Troubleshooting Guide.
Bug Fixes
Activities
-
The Type Into and Type Secure Text activities did not work properly in web applications when the EmptyField and ClickBeforeTyping check boxes were simultaneously selected.
-
Fixed an issue which caused reading an empty sheet with the Read Range activity to return a data table that contained elements.
-
Using the Read Range activity with the AddHeaders check box selected did not properly return values.
-
The Execute Macro activity could be used with Excel files that had macro 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: