UiPath Community 21.4 Preview (Note: Requires Manual Update)

UiPath Community 21.4 Preview Release

:information_source: The 21.2 Community Preview update introduced an issue with our auto-updater functionality, locking everyone who updated to the 21.2 preview version.

We have fixed this issue with our latest 21.4 Community Preview and our request is to manually update to the latest 21.4 installer. The 21.4 installer can be downloaded from your Automation Cloud resources page or directly from here:

Doing the update will ensure that you are running the newest and most stable version of Studio and will always get access to the latest features. And to make it worth your manual update, we are bringing a significant number of perfomance improvements and quality of life improvements in 21.4.


Studio

UiPath Studio 21.4 brings many new improvements under the hood with a new architecture based on .NET Core.

Please keep in mind that Studio 21.4 is no longer compatible with Windows 7.

  • Backward compatibility: all projects created with older versions of Studio are still supported at design and runtime with no additional needed changes
  • Studio 64-bit: Community installer is now a 64-bit installer. 32bit processes will continue to run in 64bit deployments. Autoupdates will rollout only to 64bit based machines as announced here:
    UiPath Studio 64-bit Community Installer

Continuous Improvements

  • Assign icons to processes and libraries: during publish you can assign icons to your processes or libraries. Libraries icons will be visible in Manage Packages, processes icons are due to appear in Assistant with future iterations.
  • Enhance the error display: if you click the error icon from the activity designer, the Properties Panel will be brought in focus and immediately display the error.
  • Support Test Activity and Run from Here for Scoped Activities: if you need to validate activities on the go you don’t need to include the parent scope anymore.
  • Pre-populate Capture Elements when started from Object Repository: if you want to continue capturing the elements from a specific Screen or Application you can pre-populate the descriptors list in Capture Elements by starting from any Object Repository tree.
  • Refresh GIT remote branches: we added the git fetch functionality for refreshing remote branches from Studio.
  • GIT in mass update tool: GIT is now a possible source for Project Dependencies Mass Update tool and you can select any remote repository.
  • Undo/Redo buttons available.
  • Remove Unused Resources: we added a dedicated section in Design Toolbar with dedicated buttons for removal of unused resources like workflows, variables, arguments, dependencies, imports and screenshots.
  • Notifications when a new version of Studio is installed.

Assistant

Send to desktop

From now on, you can bring your processes everywhere in Windows. You go into the process’ contextual menu and you press “Send to desktop”. This creates a shortcut on your desktop that you can use in order to start the process.

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Drag & drop processes into Launchpad

We added something that we should have had since we first released the Launchpad: pin processes by drag and drop.

drag&drop

Set up shortcuts from the process details

We brought the keyboard shortcuts right where you need it.
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Widget Governance via Automation Ops (Coming soon)

Starting with this release you can manage what widgets each UiPath Assistant user will get. You will be able to do this in Automation Ops from the Automation Cloud. We will add a new policy type for Assistant that will allow you to:

  • Choose if you allow users to install their own custom widgets. Basically, if you allow them to drag and drop widgets into their Assistant
  • Choose if you want to use the UiPath Official widget feeds. If you choose yes, the widgets will be downloaded from either the official feed or your Orchestrator libraries feed. If you choose no, then only the Orchestrator library feeds will be enabled
  • List the widgets that you want your users to have access to by simply adding the name and the version of the NuGet package

You can read more here about how custom widgets are built.

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Starting Apps from the UiPath Assistant (Coming soon)

The first official widget that we’ll going to release will be the Apps integration widget. With this widget, you can easily start Apps right from the Assistant. You’ll see all the Apps you have access to at the bottom of the Process list and you’ll be able to run them from there.

StudioX

Reminder: We released an activities only Preview in December which bought a significant number of improvements. Please see the UiPath December 2020 Activities Preview Release, as this release builds on those improvements.

Activity Icons

As the number of activities available in StudioX has continued to grow, it has become harder to quickly identify which activity integrates with a specific application. To help with this, you’ll now see that Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Google Sheets, and Google Drive activities use the integration’s category icon making it easier to quickly identify which activity you want
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Excel

When previewing the contents of an Excel file using the “+ sign”, the “Default” “UseExcelInstance” project setting (see December Preview notes) will automatically use the best method to show the file’s contents. Meaning it now supports any file that Excel can open at design time by default.

StudioX Activities

  • Update Excel Chart: New activity that gives the ability to update properties of an Excel chart including the data range, show/hide the title, labels, etc.
  • Find/Replace Value: New activity that enables you to find a value in a range or find and replace a value or all occurrences of a value in an Excel range.
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  • Refresh Excel Data Connections: New activity that refreshes all of the data connections in the Excel file and will not continue running the process until they have finished refressing.
  • Autofit Range: Improves the previously released “Autofit Columns” from our December preview to offer the ability to autofit rows as well as columns.
  • Format Cells: Now offers the ability to format Alignment, Font, and Fill color as well as the cell’s data category.
  • Get Excel Chart: Updates the “Copy Excel Chart” activity added in the December preview to give you the ability to copy the chart to the clipboard or save it as a picture.

PowerPoint Activities

  • Format Slide Content: New activity that enables updating the font size on a shape in PowerPoint and bringing it to the front or sending it to the back.
  • Add Data Table to Slide: Adds the ability to overwrite the contents of an existing table or append data to an existing table beyond creating new tables. This enables you to preformat tables and have the inserted data inherit the existing style/formatting.
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StudioX Mail activities

  • Use Outlook 365 activity supports shared mailboxes now! Just specify a shared mailbox in “Shared mailbox to use” field. The account selected in “Account” field must have access to the shared mailbox. The email address of the shared mailbox will be used in all mail activities added inside the scope activity (e.g., For Each Mail activity will retrieve the emails from the specified mail folder belonging to the shared mailbox).
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  • Send Email activity allows to specify the importance of an email, the sensitivity of an email and the email addresses to have replies sent to. These new fields are available in the properties panel, Options category.

  • For Each Email comes with the following enhancements:

    • It returns Non-Delivery Reports (NDR) emails too.
    • It offers the possibility to filter by Categories and by a specific Date.

Google Workspaces (G Suite) Support

We are very pleased to announce our first Preview of Google Sheets and Google Drive support designed specifically for StudioX. To try this new support, using Package Manager add a reference to the latest -preview version of the UiPath.GSuite.Activities package.

Google Sheets

  • Use Google Spreadsheet: This activity lets you connect to and work directly with a Google Spreadsheet. It offers the ability to:
    • Use existing: Click the folder icon to open the browser and browse the contents of the Google Drive associated with your account
    • Create new: Allows you to browse for the folder in which you would like to create the new spreadsheet and then indicate the display name you would like to use.
    • Create if not exists: Works similar to “Create new” except that if a sheet with the display name already exists in that folder it will be opened, where if none exist it will create a new one. If multiple spreadsheets with the indicated name are found (e.g. “Untitled spreadsheet”) you will receive an error.
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  • Updated activities: The package includes updates to the following existing G Suite activities which are now optimized to work inside the new “Use Google Spreadsheet” activity. Add New Sheet, Clear Range, Copy Sheet, Delete Range, Delete Sheet, Read Cell, Read Range, Rename Sheet, Write Cell, and Write Range.
  • Download Spreadsheet: Is a new activity that enables you to download a spreadsheet as an Excel file or PDF. This for example enables you to download as an Excel file, work with it locally, and then either upload the file or move the contents back to a Google Spreadsheet.

Google Drive

  • Use Google Drive: This activity lets you connect to all Google drive resources associated with your chosen account.
  • Updated activities: The package includes updates to the following existing G Suite activities which are now optimized to work inside the “Use Google Drive” activity. Copy File, Create File Permission (enables sharing files), Create Folder, Create New Spreadsheet, Delete File, Download File, Move File, and Upload File.

Other Activity Improvements

  • Modify Date: Gives you the ability to modify dates to find other relative dates. Examples include “Find the next Monday”, “Find one month from today”, or “Find the first day of the month”. If you are using StudioX 21.2 you will also have an option for “Today” that will get the current day whenever the automation is run.
  • Get Username/Password: You can now retrieve credential assets from Orchestrator using the “Get Username/Password” activity in StudioX by setting the “Credentials source” property to “Orchestrator”
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  • Generate DataTable from Text: Enables you to build a DataTable from text. This is useful when you need to convert structured text data (e.g. tab separated, fixed width fields, etc.) into a table to either work with directly or write to another source such as Excel or Google Sheets.
  • Work with Data Tables directly in StudioX: This has been a common request and is important functionality for working with Google Sheets. This release adds the following activities to StudioX:
    • For Each Row in DataTable: Enables you to process each row in a DataTable.
    • Read Row Item: Enables you to read the value from a cell in a DataTable row.
    • Update Row Item: Enables you to update the value of a cell in a DataTable row.

Automation Ops Public Preview

Studio Pro (Test Suite)

RPA Testing

For this community release we introduced the following improvements:

So far if an RPA project was published to Orchestrator, we also included the RPA Test Cases into it. To reduce the package size, we have now removed them from the package. To get your RPA Test Cases onto Orchestrator, you simply use the ‘Publish Test Cases’ option, as before

Mocking has been a great leap forward for our RPA Testing capabilities, providing great flexibility and the possibility to remove dependencies. What is more, via the introduction of Mock files, customers can create non-invasive RPA Test Cases, without interfering with their production workflows. To further reduce friction and make it easier to use we implemented the following enhancements:

Sync Mock files on ‘open’

It is essential for Mock files to stay in sync with their corresponding workflow file. We have increased the sync interval and now update it also on events like ‘open workflow’

Avoid nested Mocks

So far it was possible to create mocks inside of mocks, which did not add any new capability but cluttered the Test Case. We have now fixed this problem.

  • Naming of Mock activity
    If you created a Mock around a sequence, the Mock had a very generic name. To increase readability, we have adapted the name to incorporate the name of your mocked sequence instead.
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  • Coverage Panel improvements
    Our coverage panel provides detailed coverage metrics for your RPA Test Cases and we would like to evolve it further into a general Testing Panel. The first step towards this goal was to also add a Test result indication. We now not only show you the % of covered activities but also the result of your Test Cases
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Data Driven Testing

Our Data Driven Testing capabilities provide a very easy way to incorporate your test data into your test case. For this release we added additional capabilities that have been highly requested by our community:

  • Update Data Source
    Instead of removing your outdated test data, and adding the updated file instead, you now offer you a task directly on your Test Case, to update your data file.
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  • Select Data
    While you hold your test data in an Excel file, you might not always import every column or row. Now you can select the rows and columns you would like to import into Studio Pro.
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  • New Test Case dialog
    We have added a new tab to the ‘Create Test Case’ dialog, which lets you add test data during Test Case creation. The new UI should make it easier for users to configure Test Cases.
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Workflow Analyzer for Testing

We enhanced the available Workflow Analyzer Rules with testing specific rules that can check if general best practices around Test Methodology are adhered too.

Beside the possibility, that you can create your own, we deliver a set of rules directly with the Testing Activity Pack.

The rules can check e.g. if Test case names do adhere a convention, if Test cases are not too long or have too many branches (a common mistake) and if Verifications are used within a Test cases, to make sure something is verified. And many more.

We also included RPA Testing specific Rules, for example to make sure each workflow does have at least one Test cases and more.

Test Manager Integration

We enriched Studio with a set of convenience functions to further speed up managing automated test cases with UiPath Test Manager.

  • When linking automation to Test Manager test cases, Test Manager can now be instructed to create those test cases. No need to manually create them upfront in Test Manager anymore.
  • When linking automation to new Test Cases in Test Manager, optionally a requirement can be selected to assign the newly created test cases to.
  • We streamlined some labels in the ribbon toolbar and re-phrased some error messages based on feedback we received. We hope they are clearer now.
  • A set of smaller UX improvements will make life easier.

Activities

Excel

In Studio, you can now use all of the “App Integration → Excel” activities inside a “StudioX → Business → Excel → Use Excel File”. This enables you to seamlessly use functionality in the StudioX Excel activities easily in your Studio projects (see instructions on accessing StudioX activities in Studio).
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UIAutomation & Document Understanding

Testing Activity Pack

We listened to the feedback from the Community and our customers and implemented the most wanted features for the Testing Activity Pack, all around reporting and the messaging format.

  • Verify Activities

    • Custom Output/Log Messages
      Customize the Output Message of a Verification within the Verify Activity. This, in addition, can even be done on a global level for the project.
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    • Buffer the Outcome
      To react on a failed/passed result with e.g. special reporting (like a Mail or a File-Upload), the use can buffer the outcome of the Verify Activity as a Boolean and react on it.
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    • Adaptive Orchestrator Title
      The title shown in Orchestrator is not only Verification Passed/Failed anymore but carries the title of the Verification Activity. If dynamic values are needed, this can even be customized further.
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  • Attachments
    This activity lets you define artefacts like documents, that you would like to store as part of your Test Case result on Orchestrator. This might be especially useful in cases where your company policies require you to store files or documents generated during your test run to prove your test execution.

Mail activities

This release brings new mail activities and some exciting improvements to existing mail activities.

New activities

  • Set Outlook Mail Categories : Associates categories with a mail message.
  • Mark Outlook Mail As Read/Unread : Marks the specified mail message as read or unread.
  • Delete Outlook Mail Message : Deletes a mail message.

Improvements

  • Send Outlook Mail Message :

    • The user can specify the importance and sensitivity of a mail message.
    • The user can set specific mail addresses to have replies sent to.
  • Get Outlook Mail Messages:

    • The possibility to order mail messages by date, newest first or oldest first.
    • Filter by message ids.
    • The documentation of this activity has been extended with many examples of filter expressions. See it here
  • Get Exchange Mail Messages:

    • The possibility to order mail messages by date, newest first or oldest first.
    • Filtering capabilities, by filter expression and by messages ids. The filter expression can be used starting with Exchange Server 2010 version. Filtering by message ids is supported starting with Exchange Server 2013.
    • To learn about how to specify a filter expression, please read this doc.
    • Examples of filter expressions:
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  • Get IMAP Mail Messages:

  • Send SMTP Mail Message:

    • The user can set specific mail addresses to have replies sent to.
  • Save Attachments:

    • The user can specify whether to overwrite an existing file having the same name as the attached file.
  • Get Outlook Mail Messages , Get Exchange Mail Messages , and Get IMAP Mail Messages activities return calendar invites and non-delivery reports (NDR) items too.

  • All mail activities accept SecureString as input for the password, i.e., they got a new field called SecurePassword in addition to the existing Password field.

System Activities

Activities that include notifications are brought in the foreground and have focus set on them

Orchestrator

Testing

Test Configuration Parameters
UiPath Studio provides the possibility to define input arguments for Workflows and Test Cases, which allow a parametrization of automation during runtime.

This is especially useful for Testing, to avoid duplicating your Test Cases, but parametrize them accordingly during runtime. A typical case for this is e.g., testing the behavior of your application in different Browsers. While it is enough for RPA to run in your default browser, you want to test your web app in different browsers, to make sure it renders correct at your customer.

Instead of now creating several Test Cases that do the same, but run in different browsers, arguments can be applied to configure the browser context.

Challenge: Workflows allow the definition of arguments, and when starting a job, it is possible to override the default values of those arguments. When starting a Test Set with e.g. several hundreds of Test Cases, it would not be very convenient, to set the according argument values for each of them separately.

This is why we now allow you to override the default values of your Test Case arguments on Test Set level. If you define a certain argument on Test Set level, it will override the argument in each Test Case part of this Test Set.
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  • Audit Support
    Governance and Audit capabilities are mandatory for RPA, as it typically operates in a production environment and therefore has to comply with certain security standards. While Testing typically is done in a separate testing environment, it very often has to meet similar standards, which only few of the testing solutions available on the market fullfill. Fortunately, UiPath Test Suite leverages our production-grade Orchestrator and for this community release we added an additional audit section, specifically for testing.
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  • Run Test Cases on specific Robot
    Besides running your Test Cases frequently and unattended, you will have to invest some time in analyzing its results. Did you reaally spot a bug, or was it just an environment issue on the machine it has run? To make it more easy for you to answer this question, without having to open up and RDP connection to a specific robot to re-test, we now allow you to re-run Test CAses via Orchestrator on a specific machine.
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Please provide feedback

We want to hear which feature excited you the most! Please use the image button below.

20 Likes

the first impression: it takes forever to install.

3 Likes

@ali_fath we are aware that our installer can be slow sometimes as we try to deliver a lot of content to our users. Were you able to finish the installation and start Studio?

We are looking into the size issue and we will optimize the installation in the near future.

4 Likes

Does this mean upcoming enterprise release will also drop Win7 support?

Hi @khage , This has already happened with 20.10. Please check the software and hardware requirements for 20.10 here: Hardware and Software Requirements.

I like way you explaining sir.

after a restart, the uipath installed correctly, and I’m using it from then. don’t know why I can’t see an improvement in speed in total, maybe the 64bit version advantage is more capacity in memory and higher ability of activity’s process handling.
however, the error report change is fantastic. now the error show system has changed, I can say that how much old system was naive, the old system just tells you, heyyyy there is an error and i don’t know, where, why, you please help meeee human :robot: :robot:
but new error system tells you where exactly is the error and what is the error by human-understandable sentences. about the new “error system” I can say it is an strong improvement.

3 Likes

Great effort :clap: :clap:… Will be good if we get Bot Icons for Process we create in UiPath Assistant instead a square shape…

2 Likes

We are happy you are excited about the features :slight_smile: Please take them for a spin and keep the feedback coming.

And don’t forget to report any bugs you spot, we want to squash them!

2 Likes

Loved the new logo!! image

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A post was split to a new topic: Unattended Robots - An error has occurred - 21.4 and a typo