Release Notes

• Upgrade RCC to v17.3.0:
  • Supports layered environment building, unique conda-forge section build once, and cached
  • Embedded micromamba and version update to v1.5.1
  • Improvements to the process list after execution on Windows
  • Profile support to allow Legacy SSL Renegotiation
  • v17 major change: 'rcc interactive configuration' removed as Robocorp Setup Utility has the UI for creating profiles

We are excited to announce two new major features that will help you to better integrate with Robocorp Control Room and to give better visibility to self-hosted Workers.

New API based on the OpenAPI v3 specification

The new unified Control Room API consolidates the old Process, Robot, Assistant and Worker APIs under one consistent set of endpoints. Naming conventions now also reflect the current terminology used across Robocorp. The API is specified using OpenAPI v3, which makes building integrations a breeze. For example, it enables you to take advantage of all the tooling built on the top of the OpenAPI ecosystem, e.g., generating custom SDKs directly from the specification file.

The old APIs are now deprecated but will be available until the 15th of January 2025. No immediate action is required. We will be sending reminders to users of the old APIs until the discontinuation.

Authentication and authorization mechanisms will stay the same, and any existing API keys will work with the new API. We highly recommend building all new implementations on the top of the new API, and to start converting old implementations to the new specification. No new features will be added to the old API endpoints. If you need any guidance with migrating to the new API, please contact your technical account manager.

Finally, the new API is hosted under the same domain name used to access Control Room. The API helper guides you to use the appropriate domain name. This reduces the number of domains to be allow-listed and thus simplifies the network configuration requirements.

For more details about the new API please see the updated API documentation.

Worker Event Log and Notifications

The new Worker event log shows events happening in the self-hosted Workers, giving visibility to the status. It helps with troubleshooting any issues related to the configuration or the host machine.

We have also added a new notification feature, which enables you to receive e-mail notifications about the selected events you want. This enables you to stay on top of operations and take action if required.

Features

• New Control Room API
• Worker Event Log
• Worker Notifications

Getting deeper into complex enterprise setups has raised a bunch of tripping points that our tooling has not been able to detect and foresee, which have been causing some headaches in the initial setups lately. The release contains a bunch of improvements and fixes related to these cases.

• Fixed issue with Setup Utility downloads missing profile settings.
• Upgrade RCC to v17.3.0:
  • Supports layered environment building, unique conda-forge section build once, and cached
  • Embedded micromamba and version update to v1.5.1
  • Improvements to the process list after execution on Windows
  • Profile support to allow Legacy SSL Renegotiation
  • v17 major change: 'rcc interactive configuration' removed as Robocorp Setup Utility has the UI for creating profiles
• Improved service-helper to fix a bunch of issues related to admin permission pop-ups etc.

Download from here and check our documentation here.

Have a splendid day! 🚀

• Application classes from RPA.*.Application libraries can be further inherited and extended without the need of adding a mandatory class-level docstring.
• Library RPA.Robocorp.WorkItems won’t get easily affected anymore by any issue within the RPA.Email.ImapSmtp library.
• Keyword Email To Document raises appropriately when the input value is of an unexpected type.
• Takes into use the latest robocorp-storage 1.0.1, adding various fixes into the RPA.Robocorp.Storage library.

We have discovered an issue with the current python-docx==1.0.0 package that is publicly available and utilized in our rpaframework as well.

This has direct impact to our RPA.Email.ImapSmtp and the RPA.Robocorp.WorkItems libraries.

The error looks like:

To resolve the issue you can either:

👉 Upgrade rpaframework==27.4.1 OR pin python-docx==0.8.11

Robocorp templates have already been updated, so you can also follow those.

If you have any questions or issues please submit a support ticket to support@robocorp.com

• Library RPA.JavaAccessBridge (#1060; java-access-bridge-wrapper 1.1.0):
• New library import parameter max_depth which limits the maximum level the search will go when selecting a window and building the element tree. With disable_refresh one can disable any implicit global refresh when this is set to False.
• Add new keyword Refresh Element for explicitly refreshing elements. (useful when callbacks are disabled and new data appears in the app)
• Enhance Read Table with visible_only parameter which controls what kind of children (inner cells of the table) to return. The number of columns is correctly detected and the table automatically refreshes when callbacks are disabled and the global refresh is enabled.
• Bugfixes in the following keywords: Click Element, Set Display Scale Factor, Get Element Actions.

• Fix keyword Email To Document in library RPA.Email.ImapSmtp by restricting the python-docx package version to the maximum working one.

⚠️ Warning

This affected both this library and RPA.Robocorp.WorkItems due to a slipped sub-dependency breaking change. We strongly suggest to upgrade to the latest rpaframework in order to benefit from the fix, and if you’re not ready for it yet, pin in your conda.yaml python-docx==0.8.11 for the time being.

• Casual dependencies upgrades and alignment.

As you may have noticed, we have been pushing out many updates to our tools and libraries lately, so a summary of the key things you can gain by updating is in place.

Support for newer type firewalls (MITM)

New firewall setups are coming to many companies, so we had to be the bridge to get the open-source frameworks to work inside these protected networks. Tools and libraries have been updated, and we have documentation here and here.

VS Code extensions

Support for our new Python logging is now built into VS Code, and several smaller improvements and supports for Python developers have been added.

There is a dependency helper that highlights and helps you update your dependencies to new versions. Just hover over the dependencies, and you will see the versions available.

The full changelog is worth following if you want to keep up with the updates.

Setup Utility, Worker, and RCC

The latest version of Setup Utility adds new checks to identify potential blockers for Windows RDP setups. It adds a lot of new information coming from RCC diagnostics for the firewall setups and testing.

For the Worker, we would like to draw your attention to Cloud Workers specifically. Many are still running their processes on the older Ubuntu containers, so a kind reminder to update to the new Cloud Workers.

We have not seen any problems arising from this change, but switching to the new one has fixed a few cases. We also have the latest Worker (v7.1.3) in the Cloud Worker (early access), so you can always test the next upcoming Cloud Worker by using that one.

• Library RPA.PDF (#1102; rpaframework-pdf 7.3.0):
• Keywords HTML to PDF and Template HTML to PDF now support parameters margin and working_dir. Latter can be used to set directory for example image files referenced in the HTML content.
• Keyword HTML to PDF can be given a single HTML string to create single page PDF or list of HTML strings to create multi-page PDF.

We are streamlining the terminology across our product stack and have renamed Robots to Task Packages. More in-depth story about the change can be found in the blog post. The change will be at first visible at the Control Room UI and will be rolled to other parts of the Robocorp stack soon. Along with the naming change, we are introducing an updated Tasks view, which will make managing your executable code a breeze.

Renaming Robots to Task Packages

The Robot is now renamed to Task Package, and the UI has been updated to reflect the change.

The functionality of the Task Package is exactly the same as the Robot was but it is now more intuitive in the user experience. E.g. you develop Tasks with the developer tools, package them as a Task Package, add the Task Package to the Control Room, and assign the Tasks to be executed with Workers or Assistants.

New Tasks View

We have redesigned the Tasks view (previously called Robots). The new view is more intuitive to use and provides a broader visibility to your Tasks, where they are used, and how they have been used in Processes and Assistants. This will improve the management of Tasks, especially in scenarios where you have multiple Tasks and Task Packages that are used in different ways along your operations.

Features

• Renaming Robots to Task Packages
• New Tasks View

Updates

• Tables now remember state when exiting and returning to views
• Most of the clickable elements in the Control Room can now be opened in a new tabs
• Owner and Admin users in Organizations with SSO are now able to create Workspaces as a self-service

• RCC Embedded at version 16.5.0

  • Service Helper Embedded at version 1.17.1

• The new RCC version has included a legacy-renegotiation-allowed flag that will permit users to enable the legacy renegotiation if needed

• Fixed notification when upgrading the worker to the latest version for the user to restart the worker

• New Profile ability in Profile Management - start a profile from scratch

• Worker Details - reshuffling of the inner menu + ability to Lock Worker at user's will

• System Status now contains RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) related checks

• RDP Enabled support

• RDP Logon Screen warning support

• Optimisation done for the diagnostics phase

• Ability to switch between RCC profile settings & System settings while downloading the company profile

• UI/UX improvements and refactoring

Download from here and check our documentation here.

Have a splendid day! 🚀

• Add regular expression support for RPA.JavaAccessBridge library locators by updating java-access-bridge-wrapper package to the version 1.0.0.

  • Update selenium package to the version 4.13.0.

NOTE: The major version upgrade was done due to the changes to the interface between the proxy and the executor. This should not require any actions from the user as both the service and executor uses the same executable when setup is done via Robocorp Service Helper or Robocorp Setup Utility.

Updates:

• Support RCC environmentConfigs setting when sending environment configuration file to the Control Room
• Fix issue where too large first artifact blocks sending the rest of the artifacts
• Run quick RCC diagnostics when starting worker
• Always send the console messages via the proxy connector instead directly from the executor
• Simplify the interface between proxy and the executor
• Make the console.txt a DEBUG level log
• Add local timezone offset to the ISO8601 time string in the log event messages detectedAt field
• Add better error message when user requests video streaming but worker configuration has video streaming disabled
• Use Node v18 (latest LTS) to build executable
• Upgrade RCC to v16.5.0

You can find the detailed changelog for Workforce Agent Core here.

This update solves an issue where RCC locks would be reported as long paths check failed and would block the application. Now those are no longer reported and the application starts normally.

For the past three weeks, we have been working hard on finding a solution to easily use Python and open-source tools inside corporate networks that follow the pattern of man-in-the-middle or Transparent HTTPS firewalls.

Without going into the details, this is what has been causing the different SSL error cases. We've seen many companies switching or updating to this model as providers like PaloAlto, Sophos, Zscaler, etc. are all marketing this functionality.

The first version of a guiding document can be found in our docs-site. All of our templates are now also updated to the required levels.

👉 The call to action is: Update your dependencies This requires Python 3.10 and the specific version of pip that you can find in the docs and templates.

These updates enable Python implementations to use the OS-specific certificate store to validate HTTPS traffic. This should mean that the certificates provided by the firewall are valid, as it is standard practice to have IT update the certificate stores.

We've also worked hard to reduce the number of web domains you need to whitelist in your firewalls. For those using Selenium, the web drivers for the browsers now come via the robocorp.com domain, which cuts some six domains off the list.

In Setup Utility and RCC related to this we have added TLS checks to the diagnostics to help out in finding these cases.

We are not yet done, as there are still open-source tools and cases that do not enable us to fix all cases, but this is a big step forward.

• Library RPA.Browser.Selenium (#1091; rpaframework-core 11.2.0):
  • Display the used webdriver and browser versions in the logs. (#1078)
  • Support profile usage with Edge in IE mode as well. (#1079)
  • Warn when maximizing the browser in headless mode and offer help. (#1075)
• Reminder: You can disable webdriver-manager SSL checks during downloads by setting WDM_SSL_VERIFY=false in the environment.

• Library RPA.Cloud.Google (#1092; rpaframework-google 8.1.0): Add possibility to send HTML email by adding html parameter for Send Message keyword.

• Library RPA.Robocorp.Storage: Internal fix for the updated asset API upload URL and ability to set the RC_DISABLE_SSL env var in order to disable SSL checks when operating on assets.

• Multiple fixes for small issues that bring consistency in functionality and UI/UX

• New Diagnostic Details Info & Design

• New version of RCC which brings in TLS & trust chain information to Setup Utility

• This is activated only by a Network Configuration file that contains a tls-verify field

• You can learn more about this from here

• RCC Embedded at version 16.1.2

• Service Helper Embedded at version 1.14.2

Download from here and check our documentation here.

Have a splendid day! 🚀