UiPath Community 20.10 Preview Release
Following our recent UiPath Community 20.8 Preview Release is our first 20.10 LTS preview.
From this point on, focus is heavily on fixing all the bugs that we can find. Do not hesitate to report them.
If you are using our Community Edition, it should auto-update. If it didn’t, you can grab it from our Automation Cloud Resources page.
2nd Preview for 20.10 has been pushed to the Community Preview channel. Check here to see the Assistant goodies from this push.
3rd Preview has been pushed to the Community Preview channel. It contains bug fixes & improvements.
4th Preview has been pushed to the Community Preview channel. It contains bug fixes & improvements.
5th Preview has been pushed to the Community Preview channel. It contains bug fixes & improvements.
Studio
Last Studio highlight of the major 20.10 release is Object Repository. This is now included in the 20.10 Preview Community release.
See a quick demo here.
Aside from this we made improvements to Find References, Sign In Experience, C# support, Workflow Analyzer and more.
StudioX
We’ve made the following improvements to StudioX’s capabilities since the 20.8 release:
Activities
- Input Dialog: You can now prompt for input at runtime providing a title and message for the popup window.
- Write Range activity: A common request was the ability to write table data from a non-Excel source (e.g. Use “Save for Later” with the output of the “Extract Table Data” activity, then later write that to Excel). You can now do this using the newly added “Write Range” activity.
- Text to Left/Right: You can now get the text to the left and right of a separator using the “Text to Left/Right” activity. This can be very useful when working with data where a field name and value are present in the same text entry (e.g. “Name: Jane Doe”, where you want to get the person’s name to the right of the colon).
- Send Calendar Invite now works for Google calendar: You can now send calendar invites from your Google calendar when inside the “Use Gmail Account” activity.
- Get Orchestrator Asset: You can now retrieve asset values from your connected Orchestrator using the “Get Orchestrator Asset” activity.
Template Authoring/Sharing
You can now author and share templates for StudioX users using the “Template” project type. Templates published to a shared template feed can then be accessed and used by any StudioX user connected to the same feed.
Microsoft Office Repair Script
Microsoft Office can have installation issues which result in errors when trying to build automations with Office (especially Excel) using StudioX. To help with this, we now include a “Repair Tool for Microsoft Office Interop” that will attempt to repair common issues which prevent use with StudioX. The repair tool has two modes:
- Run repair actions: This will run the repair script directly on your machine
- Create .REG file. This will create a registry file you can choose how to deploy and install. This option is useful for large organizations where users do not have admin rights on their machine, so IT needs to centrally deploy the repair actions.
The repair tool can be accessed from the “Apps” section of the “Tools” tab on the Home page:
Robot & UiPath Assistant
Picture in Picture
The PiP feature got a revamp in this release. The UI is slicker and more important you can now invoke workflows and processes from Main session to Picture in Picture session by using the new Target Session argument for the InvokeWorkflow, InvokeProcess and RunParallelProcess activities.
For you to be able to check what the Robot did, the Picture in Picture session now remains open even after the process ended. It must be closed manually when you don’t need it anymore.
Delete personal processes
From now on, you can easily delete processes that you do not need any more from your personal folder. You just go to their contextual menu in the Assistant and press Uninstall. Notice that this will delete the process from Orchestrator but the NuGet package will remain untouched.
Always running processes
With the higher demand for improving the relationship between humans and UiPath’s Robots, we have developed a new feature that allows you to have processes that run continuously.
This is called “Always Running Processes” and keeps a process running at all times making it easier to deploy processes to users and keeping them running without the need for user interaction. Processes that are marked in this way, cannot be stopped from the Assistant.
Note: As part of the second 20.10 Preview release, more features were added into the UiPath Assistant. You can check them below, in the following comment: UiPath Community 20.10 Preview Release - #30 by radutzp
Desktop Triggers
We continue expand the capabilities of monitoring various UI automation events by releasing two new triggers:
ElementStatusChangeTrigger
This new activity can be used to monitor when an UI element appears or disappears from the screen. Thus, enables capabilities to start automation scenarios when applications are opened and navigated to certain screens, when pages are displayed, or event buttons, labels or images appear/disappear on/form the screen. It can be used with the TriggerScope activity and combined with triggers of the same type for complex UI elements monitoring scenarios:
ElementAttributeChangeTrigger
One more trigger for implementing more refined UI automation scenarios. If helps you monitor an attribute specific to an UI element, for change. For example, you could monitor a button changing its color or its label.
UIAutomation
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Relevant SelectorNotFound error messages
No more unavailing SelectorNotFound error messages. We improved them such that to give details and alternatives regarding the failing selector. One can find out on the spot, which part of the selector failed validation and what options were found on the target application to fix it right away.
Just an example here:
UiPath.Core.SelectorNotFoundException: Could not find the UI element corresponding to this selector: [1] <wnd app='doubleui.exe' cls='HwndWrapper*' title='DoubleUI'/> [2] <ctrl automationid='transnrlabel' text='719980'/>
Search failed at selector tag:
[2] <ctrl automationid='transnrlabel' text='719980'/>
The closest matches found are:
[67%] <ctrl automationid='transnrlabel' text='918173'/> [55%] <ctrl automationid='accountnrlabel' text='461505580'/> [46%] <ctrl automationid='DateLabel' text='09/07/2020'/>
UI Automation Next (aka Modern)
This release is a bit thinner compared to last month’s release, as we’re fixing issues and fine tuning, and focusing less on new features.
- Recorder switch for input method - now you can customize the Input Method used to perform all actions in the recorder. This doubles as a quick way to see which method works best, since there is no rule of thumb for picking one.
- Modern selection for old UIA activities - we’re not leaving the tried & tested UIAutomation Classic activities behind. We actually have bigger plans for them, but for now we ported the selection look & feel from UIAutomation Next to Classic .
- Other small improvements & fixes
Computer Vision
With this release we aimed to modify the Refresh System and make it more intuitive for developers. Here are some of the big changes:
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All the screens will now be hosted in the Screen Scope and you can see and rename them.
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Each activity will have it’s screen name specified on the activity designer and you can switch each activity from one screen to another.
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In the designer you can specify on with which screen you want to work with.
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The Refresh Activity will be deprecated, all the functionality will be taken over by the activity screen picker.
What do you think? What did we miss? What do you expect next?
Feel free to provide feedback here, or via any of the following methods:
Forum FAQ - Community feedback initiative