UiPath 2019 Fast Track Preview (Community Edition v2019.1.0)

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2019 Fast Track Preview brings us a new and shiny public preview release: v2019.1.0 Community Edition! :heart:

Oh, and a new release cycle. In the limelight: you. :wink:

Each month of this year we’re aiming at releasing a new Community version, so that you get to be the first to check out all the latest available features, improvements, and bug fixes. :cookie: Twice per year, the Enterprise users are gonna catch up.

You know the drill: if you’re on the Stable channel, restart Studio. If you’re on Beta, this post is only a confirmation of what you already see. And no, we didn’t forget about Orchestrator Community Edition.

Scroll down for release notes! Try not to yawn too much!

You can submit your thoughts, feedback and/or issues by creating a New Topic in the 2019 Fast Track (Preview) category. We suggest you use one of the tags bug, suggestions, how-to, error, general-inquiry to help us know at a glance what your question is about.

What’s New

Extensibility and Performance

For an enhanced all-around sync of activities, packages, and libraries in multi-node environments, package metadata is now saved to your SQL database. On top of that, instead of the ordinary File System, you can set up your Orchestrator instance to store all these artifacts in a blob storage, namely Azure Blob Storage. A few more goodies are on the way so stay tuned. More information on how you can set this up is available here.

Project Versioning

To improve interoperability and streamline project versioning, Studio now has Semantic Versioning. Versions of your projects can now be set in the major.minor.patch format, and you can set a Prerelease tag for intermediary versions. Read more about semantic versioning in the documentation.

Improvements

Studio

The Package Manager now integrates support for activity packages with license agreements. Make sure to read and accept the license terms before installing the package to your automation project. To find out more check the documentation.

Renaming an argument from the Argument panel updates all its occurrences across the file.

Studio introduces High Contrast mode, available in the Theme drop-down list in the Backstage View.

Robot

Start and stop processes at the press of a button. Literally! It’s now possible to assign global keyboard shortcuts to start/pause and stop processes from the Robot Agent (Tray). This allows you to easily cease and resume execution on Attended Robots without having to use the mouse. It comes in handy especially if the process uses plenty of Click activities. Read more about it on this page.

It’s now easier to tell whether the Robot is installed as a Service or in User Mode. The UiPath.Service.Host.exe file is executed when the Robot is installed as a Service, while the UiPath.Service.UserHost.exe file is launched when in User Mode. Rest assured, the installers all accommodate this change. For more information, check out the installation, update, and CLI guides.

In an attempt to deliver more control over process execution, we have added a feature flag which can block execution of processes from the command line while the Robot is connected to Orchestrator. It is enabled from the UiPath.settings file. Here’s how it’s done.

We’re paving the way for full accessibility support. As a consequence, applications which provide visual and auditory feedback (such as Speech Viewer) can now interact with the Robot Agent buttons, labels, including the processes in the tray.

Orchestrator

Orchestrator ships with multiple improvements regarding permissions, thus making role management easier than ever. You are no longer required to select permissions one by one. With the click of a button, you can now select each set that interests you either by category or by permission type, in case that serves you better. In addition to that, the Libraries page now has its very own set of permissions, separate from packages. Details here and here.

Worried you won’t be notified in time that your license is about to expire? On the contrary, you consider email alerts to be a nightmare? We’ve got you all covered as we added a new parameter in the web.config file which allows you to set your preferred checkpoints in terms of license expiry notification emails. By default, the parameter is configured such that emails are sent 180, 90, 30, 14, 7 and 1 day before the expiry date. See here how to configure your own values.

Orchestrator drop-downs have been upgraded. We now have scroll bars to help you browse through all existing entries. Happy scrolling!

We were on a mission to optimize Redis cache usage and we did it. We made a series of improvements, all aimed at reducing the number of Redis calls.

The Value field for both global and per-robot text assets now allows for up to 1.000.000 characters.

Alert distribution has been optimized, thus ensuring a faster performing alert mechanism even in the context of many subscribers.

Activities

The Digitize Document activity has been improved performance-wise with some backend changes.

Setup

To help you get a better handle on what happened during the setup process, UiPathStudio.msi now also logs licensing information (regutil.exe) while it is running, at a custom location.

Known Issues

Orchestrator

  • Removing Robots from an environment is causing the remaining Robots on that environment to stop executing jobs, despite being available.

Bug Fixes

Studio

  • If you used the Extract as Workflow feature for an activity with two referenced variables, only one of them was extracted as an argument.

  • If you placed a breakpoint on an invoked workflow and then used Step Over, the debugging did not return to the parent workflow.

  • Fixed an issue that prevented variables in a Flowchart from being renamed across activities that contain Expression and Condition properties.

Robot

  • Changing the system date or time during the process execution would interrupt and fail it. This happened because of the .NET functionality used to store time variables, which is also responsible for deciding the session idle time.

  • The Locals now properly displays variable information.

  • When in User Mode, the Robot would not disconnect after the user logged off.

  • Support for CAA components in the Fujitsu Java framework was introduced, while also fixing the functionality of the Extract Data activity on tables.

  • Fixed several Nexaweb Java framework related issues which were affecting combo boxes and the functionality of the Extract Data activity on tables.

  • Fixed an issue which was causing particular HTML elements to trigger an error when selected with UI Explorer.

  • The Robot Agent was inconsistent when Windows was set to High Contrast Mode.

  • The process status in the Robot Agent did not automatically update for processes started from Studio and which contain the Report Status activity.

  • Projects failed to be published from Studio Community Edition to Orchestrator.

Orchestrator

  • It is no longer possible to delete organization units if they have at least one user associated with it.

  • If you started a job on a Robot with no configured execution settings, Orchestrator automatically configured them to false.

  • The body of GET requests to the /odata/Robots/UiPath.Server.Configuration.OData.GetUsernames() endpoint did not include the @odata.count annotation in the response.

  • The RolesList parameter was not populated if you made GET requests to the /odata/Users(Id) endpoint.

  • POST calls to the /odata/HostLicenses/UiPath.Server.Configuration.OData.DeleteTenantLicense endpoint did not return 400 Bad Request, although the provided tenant Id did not exist.

  • Fixed an issue that prevented the 404 Not Found error message from being returned if you performed a POST request to the /odata/HostLicenses/UiPath.Server.Configuration.OData.SetTenantLicense endpoint and provided an invalid tenant Id.

  • Errors generated by the /odata/Permissions endpoint were logged with both Orchestrator and Orchestrator.BusinessException sources. Now, they are properly logged only under the Orchestrator source.

  • Multiple quartz triggers were generated in the database for non-existing jobs. This had a detrimental effect on the performance of the scheduling functionality.

  • Occasionally, in poorly performing networks or Orchestrator instances, the user was not logged out of the application after clicking Log Out.

  • The performance of the database notification distribution process was impaired in the context of thousands of alerts being generated at once. For this reason, a timeout exception was occasionally logged as well. Click here for a maintenance solution which may prevent further performance issues and can improve the SQL database response times.

  • Any changes made to the Logging Level and Allow Development Logging options on the Settings tab were not taken into account when starting processes from the Robot tray. This occurred only if the processes were started before the Robot had sent a heartbeat.

  • The Open Alerts Preferences icon for the Alerts drop-down was not displayed if you opened your Orchestrator instance in Internet Explorer.

  • Sorting by name or surname did not work on the Users page if at least one user on the list had neither a name nor a surname, respectively.

  • A user with the Robot role was prevented from accessing the Settings page, even if the role has View permissions on Settings by default.

  • The Upload, Renew and Delete buttons on the License page were not displayed unless having Edit permissions on Settings.

  • The Delete button was disabled whenever adding or removing the Administrator role from the current user.

  • Refreshing twice the Manage Users or Manage Environment window cleared all selected entries while still displaying the row count according to the previous selection.

  • Columns on the Schedules page disappeared when you resized the browser window.

  • The StopStrategy parameter on the Audit Data window was set to Kill for a newly created schedule without a stop strategy defined.

  • You were not able to navigate through the search results in a drop-down list by using the arrow keys. This only occurred in Internet Explorer.

  • The left-hand menu disappeared from the screen if you pressed the Escape key.

UI Automation

The UIAutomation.Activities v19.1 comes with a bunch of bug fixes and improvements we’re sure you enjoy.

  • The Data Scraping wizard threw an error if you tried to scrape nested tables in Internet Explorer.

  • In some cases, the Click activity would not accurately identify web page elements which were not in view.

  • Particular keyboard input events were erroneously flagged by the Type Into with the SimulateType property enabled.

  • In Java apps, selectors were improperly built for contextual menu items.

  • Selecting CSS elements from a web page in Internet Explorer would return an error.

  • Selectors could not be properly generated by UI Explorer for particular Java apps. In some situations, this would cause the Java app to stop working.

  • The Click activity with the SimulateClick property enabled would improperly interact with particular web page elements in Internet Explorer.

  • Selectors were erroneously generated when using the SAP Business Client (NetWeaver).

  • The Type Into activity with the SimulateType property enabled would not always properly type inside fields on the Orchestrator login page.

Activities

  • Fixed an issue which caused certain UI elements to flicker in the Validation Station wizard.

  • The OperatorConfirmed flag in the ExtractionResults JSON file remained False regardless of whether an user had confirmed the extraction results or not.

  • In certain cases, the Prepare Validation Station Data activity could not read document information from FCDocument variables.

  • Numeric values could not be found if their decimal values were not supplied when using the Filter Data Table activity.

  • The proper exception is now thrown when using the Activate activity with an invalid selector.

  • The NPOI and SharpLibZip dependencies have been updated to versions 2.4.1 and 1.0 respectively, thus ensuring we use the latest versions for the Excel activity package.

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:

  • UiPath.Excel.Activities - v2.5.1

  • UiPath.Mail.Activities - v1.3.0

  • UiPath.System.Activities - v18.4.2

  • UiPath.UIAutomation.Activities - v19.1.0

See below for all release notes for UiPath 2019 Fast Track Preview:

41 Likes
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Awesome!!!

Now we just have to wait a GIT integration to be a perfect world :nerd_face:

23 Likes
14

Great!!! :star_struck::star_struck::star_struck::clap::clap::clap::robot::robot:

7 Likes
15

This is incredible, kudos to team UiPath :+1: :clap:

6 Likes
16

Finally. It’s here. :+1:

13 Likes
17

Great :clap::clap::clap::heart_eyes:

2 Likes
19

Stay tuned for 19.2 if you liked this one :slight_smile:

3 Likes
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just want to check if C# is supported as mentioned here

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Hi @garywjd91

No, not just yet. It is recognized as an important piece of the puzzle thoguh and will be introduced at one point.