UiPath 2019 Preview (Community Edition v2019.8.0)

2019 Preview brings you the fourth iteration of our soon-to-be LTS: v2019.8.0 Community Edition! :partying_face::star_struck:

If you’re on the Studio Stable channel, our latest 2019.8.0 version is already available to you. You can also download this version from your Cloud Platform account.

Without further ado, please check out below the goodies packed in this Community Edition release.

What’s New

Agent Desktop

It’s time for the Robot (tray) Agent’s new groove! It is wrapped around a fresh new design, coming equipped with all the functionalities of the old Robot tray, plus some extra goodies reserved for the future, so stay tuned. Find out all about the new Agent Desktop and all of its capabilities on this page.

In preparation of the new Agent Desktop’s full capabilities, Studio introduces the Background Process template for creating non-interactive processes with capabilities of running concurrently on the same Robot, once support is available. Read here about this new template in Studio.

Activity Project Settings

To enhance extensibility, Studio now offers the possibility to adjust properties for UIAutomation activities from a centralized place. The Project Settings window now accommodates OCR and UIAutomation-related property settings to be applied at production and debugging times. Read more about activity project settings here.

Usability

The Jump to activity search bar part of the Command Palette offers a way to navigate through activities in the .xaml and to focus the selected one in the Designer panel. Jump to activity is opened using the Ctrl + T keyboard shortcut or from the Command Palette. Read more about this here.

To make working with Studio easier, the list of useful keyboard shortcuts is now visible in the Designer panel, when all files are closed. Check it out in dark theme here.

The search icon in Studio now opens the Command Palette, offering an even faster way of adding or jumping to activities, and searching through your project files.

The Auto Arrange context menu option for flowcharts allows you to automatically arrange activities following the logic of each connector. Read more about flowcharts here.

Stronger Debugging

Studio is switching to a debug first approach by placing debugging at the forefront of automation. This introduces new functionality to the Start, formerly known as Run, which now incorporates execution and debugging options for a single file or the whole project. Read more about this here.

Perform a check on a single activity by assigning values to variables and arguments that are in scope using the Test Activity option. Learn more about this here.

The Validate button checks the currently opened file for errors, while the new Validate All option does the same check on the whole automation project. Found errors are displayed in the Error List panel. Read more about validating workflows here.

The Error List panel displays errors found during validation, including their description and file path. Double-click an error to highlight the activity which threw it. Read more about the Error List panel here.

The Immediate panel is now available in debug mode giving you control over inspecting data available at a certain point during debugging. Use the panel to assign and inspect values to variables and arguments. Read more about the new panel here.

The Restart ribbon button can be used for restarting the debugging process from the first activity. It is available only when debugging is paused. Read more about this here.

Arguments are now visible in the Locals panel. In addition, any expressions containing arguments can be evaluated in the Immediate panel, or monitored in the Watch panel.

RegEx Based Extractor Activity

Good news! There is a new activity, RegEx Based Extractor, available in the UiPath.IntelligentOCR.Activities pack. You are now able to easily configure your RegEx expression by using the wizard and to extract specific information from documents. Check out the new activity here.

Active Directory Domain Services

This extensive new release from UiPath enables you to easily configure and automate Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services processes. Active Directory objects such as users, groups, and computers, are now within your grasp with this activity pack.

VMware

The VMWare activities pack contains activities that can easily automate VMWare environments, thus making IT Automation a reality. You can provision, manipulate, and configure virtual machines with the aid of this activity pack, all from the UiPath ecosystem.

Exchange Server

The new Exchange Server Activities pack contains activities that are designed to make your interaction with on-premises deployments of the Microsoft Exchange Server easier. The activities in this pack enable you to easily provision and manipulate Exchange mailboxes, providing IT departments with the power of automation.

Localization

Localization has been enriched. We now added German, Portuguese (Brazil), and Korean.

Improvements

Studio

The Locals panel is now organized in a more tabular way with the ability to expand on complex objects. Check it out here.

The type of exception is now visible in the Locals panel if the Break on Exception option was previously selected. The activity that threw the exception is now highlighted in red, in the Designer panel.

Whenever an exception is encountered during debugging, you can choose to Retry the activity, Ignore the exception, Continue the execution and let the Global Exception Handler step in, or click Stop to abort the execution. These actions are now available in the Execute tab. Read more about Global Exception Handler improvements here.

The Output panel has been enriched with the Export Logs button, which exports all or a certain batch of logs into a .txt file, together with timestamps and error message details. Read more about this here.

Searching in the Output panel is easier. Now, when selecting a search result the item is highlighted in the panel.

The Activity panel now displays the keyboard shortcuts for focusing the search bar. The previously used search query is kept and selected when refocusing the panel.

The System.Data.DataTable is now a default type of variable or argument. This means that the namespace is available by default in the Variables and Arguments panels. Read more about the Variables and the Arguments panels.

The Reset Settings button can now reset the list of favorites from the Activities panel.

The Keep last opened tabs toggle in the Backstage view allows Studio to remember the files that were open before the project was closed and reopen them the next time the project is opened. Check out design settings here.

Activities from read-only files can now be copied to another workflow or a.txt file.

Within the Project panel, you can now drag files from one folder and drop them to another project folder.

On Studio Community Edition, the Include Prerelease box in the Manage Packages window is now checked by default. The box is unchecked if Studio is licensed with an Enterprise Edition license key.

Studio now exposes additional data to activities: the authentication token and theme settings. This allows for more capability when building custom activities.

Activities

The icons for all activities have a fresh new look. You can now easily identify the activities not only by their names but by their icons as well.

The HandwritingRecognition option was added to the Microsoft Azure Computer Vision OCR activity. Reading documents written by hand is always a challenge. Ease your job by using the new HandwritingRecognition option that can extract information from handwritten documents. Check out the new option here.

The Manage PDF Password activity has been improved and it now has extra fields, differentiating the User and Owner passwords. You can now safety update the passwords for both User and Owner, where the User has read only rights and the Owner has editing rights.

UIAutomation

As a result of working to provide native automation for Chromium, you can now generate native selectors for applications embedding Chromium through CefSharp.

Added the ClickType property to the Click Trigger activity which allows you to specify the default type of trigger for a click event.

Java

Selectors for the NetPhantom framework are now natively generated.

Various improvements to element selection from CAA Tables have been made.

It’s now possible to automate desktop Silverlight applications by simply installing the corresponding extension.

Breaking Changes

Activities

  • Major updates related to the internal handling of .pdf files occurred for the Digitize Document activity. This has led to a breaking change for the UiPath.IntelligentOCR activities pack, which caused the version to skip ahead from v2.3.0 to v3.0.0.

  • The last update for the UiPath.PDF.Activities pack improved the process of retrieving text from .pdf files and organizing it. This has led to a breaking change for the UiPath.PDF.Activities pack, which caused the version to skip ahead from v2.1.0 to v3.0.0.

  • If the UiPath.IntelligentOCR.Activities and UiPath.PDF.Activities packages are used in the same project you need to have either version 2.x of both, or versions 3.x of both. UiPath.IntelligentOCR.Activities version 3.0 and higher is incompatible with a UiPath.PDF.Activities version lower than 3.0, and a UiPath.PDF.Activities version 3.0 or higher is incompatible with a UiPath.IntelligentOCR.Activities version lower than 3.0.

Known Issues

Studio

  • App shortcuts for Studio and Robot may become unresponsive if the upgrade process was interrupted. It is recommended to navigate to the installation folder of the previous Studio version, launch UiPath.Studio.exe and wait for the upgrade process to complete.

  • The values assigned in the Immediate panel to variables and arguments are updated in the Watch and Locals panel only after the next debugging action is taken.

  • When used after the Activities panel search bar, the Command Palette sometimes persists on screen, unless the focus switches to another tab, like the Project panel.

  • In the Breakpoints Settings window, text in the Condition and Log Message fields is persistent despite clicking another area of the window.

  • The elements of complex objects cannot be modified in the Immediate window.

  • The Output panel does not display validation errors for both the current file and the whole project.

  • The Locals panel is emptied after executing the last activity in a container during debugging with Step Into.

  • The validation warning on the Invoke Code activity is removed if an activity package is installed. Validate the workflow again for the icon to reappear.

  • The Step Into, Step Over, and Step Out actions are unavailable after an exception is encountered and the debugging is paused. Use the Ignore action to continue from the next activity.

Activities

  • The user interface of the OmniPage OCR activity is available, for the moment, only in English. This does not affect the languages listed in the Basic and Extended Packages.

Bug Fixes

Activities

  • Fixed an issue which caused the Digitize Document activity to throw an error when trying to process a high-resolution image inside a .pdf file. Now, the high-resolution images are processed correctly and digitized.

  • Improved integration of the Digitize Document activity with OCR engines, including support for rotation (where supported by the OCR engine) and improved accuracy of word-building.

  • Fixed an issue which caused the Digitize Document activity to receive incorrect character coordinates. The character coordinates are now received correctly.

  • Fixed an issue which caused the Present Validation Station activity to fail loading images with very high resolutions. Now, all images, no matter the resolution size, are processed correctly.

  • When combining the UiPath.PDF.Activities pack v2.1.0 with the UiPath.UiAutomation.Activities pack v19.5.0 or lower, the Read PDF with OCR activity was throwing an exception when reading certain .pdf files. Now, with the new UiPath.PDF.Activities v3.0.0, the activity is working as desired.

Activities Versions

The following activity packages and versions are included in the .msi installer and can be found in the local feed. Packs that are in bold are added as dependencies, by default, to a newly created project in Studio:

  • UiPath.UIAutomation.Activities - v19.8.0-ce

  • UiPath.System.Activities - v19.8.0

  • UiPath.Mail.Activities - v1.6.0

  • UiPath.Excel.Activities - v2.6.3

  • UiPath.Cognitive.Activities - v2.2.3

  • UiPath.IntelligentOCR.Activities - v3.0.0

  • UiPath.PDF.Activities - v3.0.0

  • UiPath.Terminal.Activities - v1.3.3

  • UiPath.Web.Activities - v1.4.3

  • UiPath.Word.Activities - v1.3.3

23 Likes

Thanks for all of your hard work, the contents of this update look amazing so far!

Really excited to try out the RegEx Based Extractor later today.

4 Likes

I really liked the major improvements made for Read PDF Text :muscle:t2:

6 Likes

another glimpse from UiPath.

very impressed with Jump To Activity, Local Panel etc…

2 Likes

Wow :star_struck: awesome job by the team UiPath.
Great, all this is, so exciting specially that Agent Desktop concept.

5 Likes

@alexandra.vaidos

Great work Team. waiting for HandwritingRecognition feature and Stronger Debugging Feature .:love_you_gesture::love_you_gesture::love_you_gesture:

Thanks

5 Likes

Thanks guys for your dedication… To improve uipath…

2 Likes

I specifically liked the test activity option and Project Settings–> UI automation option.

I am not able to get the regex option working.

But well done!

Looking forward to explore the other options.

Minal

3 Likes

The System.Data.DataTable is now a default type of variable or argument.

This is very convenient. :clap:
Good functions facilitate our job. :star_struck:

2 Likes

Great work guys!!!

A brand new version with brand new features!!! :smiley:

Well done!!!
Looking forward to try out the new features!!

1 Like

Please be aware that from 2019.8, Start button default behaviour is changed

It will now default to Debug instead of Run

Other options can be accessed via the dropdown, as seen here:

image

In short:

  • Start will run the Debug for the entire project, starting at the workflow set as main
    (typically Main.xaml)

  • Start Without Debugging will Run the entire project, starting at the workflow set as main (typically Main.xaml)

  • Start File will Debug the currently selected Xaml file tab

  • Start File Without Debugging will Run the currently selected Xaml file tab

I hope it clears some confusion :slight_smile:

7 Likes

This interface affects usability very badly. It’s not intuitive.
image
UIPath developers should separate release mode and debug mode as possible and separate start buttons for file and for entire project.

For example, how it was made in MS VS 2017. The result would be the one button “Run” and two lists of file/project and debug/release.
image

Thanks.

11 Likes

Thanks team UiPath for all of your hard work. :clap::clap:

3 Likes

Thanks team UiPath for all of your hard work. :clap::clap:

3 Likes

I was losing my mind why that happened, anyway thanks .

2 Likes

That is a great idea. I hope UiPath will consider it.

1 Like

Separating Release and Debug Mode is actually a very good idea, especially in the context of Activities Project Settings which come in 2 sets: Release and Debug. Separate Start buttons for File and Project is also interesting, thanks for the feedback.

2 Likes

hi got a problem when i click on start button then i will go in debug mode after some times execution will be closed and only working in main section. just example. when i use flow chart and add to message box (“hello”) i want to output hello . but in this example only execute main section . my flow chart section not execute. please clarify this confusion

1 Like

Hi @priyranjan

Please see my response a few post above in this thread :slight_smile:

1 Like

Thank you for the updates you’ve been expecting every time.
As a uipath user, I’d like to suggest one thing.
I wish I could check the argument with debugging.
I wonder how everyone checks the argument every time.

1 Like