UiPath Studio Improvements Suggestion - Injection, Global timeout etc

Hi UiPath team, community, everyone else.
This is my first time writing here so if I missed the address please redirect me to the right one.
Also if you believe that some of the people from UiPath need to see those improvements feel free to tag them in comments.

I have been using UiPath for some time, while using it I came upon a lot of situations where I would like to see something done differently but as the time passes and updates getting out I see many of those small things are fixed.
But there is still some items which I would like to see (Or maybe they exist already but I am not aware of them, pointing them out will made my life little easier)

  1. Value Injection - Very often I find myself in a situation where I would like to have some value injected while automation is paused with breakpoint. I don’t need to run entire bot to test something, I just need one value from config or something similar.
    While debugging automation its easy in the begging but when we are debugging very end of the project it can be time consuming to wait for the bot to come to the very end.

  2. Global Timeout - In Many cases I decide to tight automation with global timeout, or opposite to make it more stable for slower environments by extending timeout, yes there is solution for this to insert variable into this filed and to call the value from config but again it can be time consuming, especially if there are old projects, or if project migrated to another environment so I didn’t put variable there. It would be beneficial if I could apply global setting of changing default timeout for that project only.

  3. Surround with parallel - It happened to me often that after I created all steps for automation realize it would be better to put all activities to “parallel” but there are many of them, I need to insert one by one or by selecting them, working through RDP it can be time exhausting and slow task, it is not big stopper there is absolutely easy way to do this but it would be even faster and better if I could just select activities, click right click and then select “Surround with Parallel” just like we have “Surround with Try Catch”

  4. Slow step Reverse - Yeah I know its not big of a deal, there is 4 speeds of slow step, I even build muscle memory to turn it of or to go all the way around to first speed, but it would be nice if I could hold (for example) Shift key and clicking on “slow step” I go backward, so if I want to go from second speed to first (slowest) I don’t need to click 5 times I can hold Shift and click only once

  5. Mark Tail - Many times when I am on someone else project, when I am debugging I tend to go deep into workflows and workflows and workflows… I tend to lose my self easily, I would like if I can open workflow, and take a look, when I close it and when I am returned on previous tab to actually have marked which workflow I opened, its like “Execution Trail” in debugging but to track my movement through process while offline

2 Likes

Hi Djuro,

I think there are already solutions for some of your points, others I share my thoughts.

  1. Use test cases, you can use them to pass variables to a workflow in order to test it. If you have very large workflows perhaps consider breaking them apart more to allow better unit testing.

  2. There is already a solution for this. If you go to Project Settings there are various ‘Activity Settings’ depending on the nuget packages you have installed in that project. There are options to set a global timeout for activities in run/debug mode for anything that doesn’t have a timeout set.

  3. I dont find this a common need but I understand you wanting it. Would depend on demand cause it could clutter the Ui

  4. This should easily be fixed with a dropdown on the Ribbon so you choose the speed you want rather than toggling through options. Toggling is an annoying way even if you can reverse.

  5. I think a bookmarking function could be useful perhaps.

1 Like

Hi @Djuro

Great feedback, I pushed it to our internal ideas tracker for our Studio team to discover and consider in the future.

On the first point, I can only add that this is already possible (to some extent) via the Immediate panel during debugging.

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I think a very useful feature for debugging would be to choose it you want to add an annotation at the bottom as well as at the top of an activity, especially for Sequences, For Each and Do activities, this would make it easier to find the bottom instead of scrolling until you find it. Currently I add comment activities at the end that I can then search for.

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