UiPath Community 20.10 Stable Release - UiAutomation

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UiPath Community 20.10 Stable Release

UIAutomation Activities

UIAutomation and UIAutomationNext (aka Modern) merge into one package: UIAutomation

We have merged the UIANext package into UIA, so now everything is available by just upgrading to latest UIA. Accessing the 2 packages is done through the backstage switch placed in Project Settings area, or the Activities filter. This merger allows using both UIA & UIAN activities in a workflow, including passing UIElements between them, for normal activities and scopes/cards

Modern vs Classic UIA view

Modern setting enables the usage of the UIAutomationNext (Modern) and compatible UIAutomation classic activities, while generates Unified Target descriptors. In addition, the Studio ribbon menu, offers the new technology & application virtualization agnostic recorder.

ClickRelative

By default all targets that support Click Offset now have this crosshair on them that can be dragged, deleted, and repositioned.

UIExplorer

UIExplorer has been added as an advanced editor in the selection screen for all the selectors of target & anchors

Minimize/maximize through UIA

Window manipulation activities have been added from UIA, now available in StudioX as well.

Screenshot (file)

The option to save a screenshot directly to a file has been added to the Screenshot activity, with auto-increment options to avoid overwriting files.

Type - censor passwords

This privacy feature has been added in the Type activity, both in the designer and recorder

Designer:

Recorder:

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 .

C# support within the activities and wizards

Starting with 20.10 release, the UIAutomation activities are C# compliant

UIAutomation

Scraping support for SAP List Viewer (ALV LIST)

The SAP UI automation support is getting richer with the SAP List Viewer scraping enhancements. For now, we can scrape a simple list with one table on the page.

Reliable automation for SAP Fiori business application based on SAP UI5 stable attributes

With the new default selectors based on the SAP UI5 framework (e.g ui-class, uip attributes), building automation with Fiori’s web interface just became very reliable and resilient to any DOM changes.

SAP FIORI uses the UI5 framework to display its elements on the page. Selectors generated for these elements are now easy to recognize by the ui5 attribute in selectors.

Also, you can now use the entire range of activities from UiPath.UIAutomation.Activities pack to create your automation projects, activities like Check, Select Item, SelectMultipleItems.

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'/>

Inject .NET Code Activity

The activity is a low-level tool intended to be used on .NET UI applications that do not expose traditional automation technologies (AA, UIA) or when such technologies are exposed but regular UIAutomation activities cannot achieve the desired automation results due to application limitations. It is recommended (but not limited to) for WPF and WinForms Windows applications.

Desktop Triggers

We continue the investment in the desktop triggers and release a new framework which responds better to your RPA development needs. Please check out the new trigger framework which consists on the below components.

Trigger Scope Activity

A completely new scope activity for triggers. No matter if they are part of UI Automation, System or other trigger type, this one supports even mixing them. It offers the required arguments to work with the fired trigger out of the box, like trigger name and type or its source event. Moreover, it can treat the incoming events sequentially or concurrently while it can exit after one execution.

Triggers UI Redesign

We have redesigned all the existing triggers and moved the most used properties at hand.

Just a few examples here:

Triggers SDK

Most importantly, we democratize the trigger development. We provide a trigger SDK for everyone to use and develop custom triggers, just like do with custom activities.

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.

Computer Vision

Computer Vision Activities

Extract Table Activity

A big focus with the most recent releases has been improving the way RPA Developers can interact with tables using the Computer Vision solution. With this release we have improved scraping data by including a new activity CV Extract Table. The activity allows for easy identification and scraping of tables.

New Refresh System

We aimed to modify the Refresh System and make it more intuitive for developers. Here are some of the big changes:

• All the screens will now be hosted in the Screen Scope and you can see and rename them.
• Each activity will have its screen name specified on the activity designer and you can switch each activity from one screen to another.
• In the designer you can specify on with which screen you want to work with.
• The Refresh Activity will be deprecated, all the functionality will be taken over by the activity screen picker.

Local Computer Vision Server

We have added Computer Vision UI analyses capability to robots. The new UiPath.ComputerVision.LocalServer package is a small sized model that can be ran directly on robot machines without requiring extra configuration.