Release Notes

• Library RPA.DocumentAI.Base64AI (#719):

• Fix signature matching API.

• Better documentation and errors.

• Library RPA.PDF (#1051; rpaframework-pdf 7.1.6):

• Make the reader parameter optional in the Save PDF keyword.

• Fix PDF fields retrieval, value decoding and setting. (#872)

• Library RPA.Salesforce (#1003): Add keywords Auth with connected app and Execute APEX.
• Library RPA.Email.ImapSmtp (#1054): Fix handling of To, Cc and Bcc fields in Send Message keyword.

In this Control Room update, we are introducing brand new and improved Worker views for you to conveniently manage a large number of Workers, along with a few smaller UX improvements and bug fixes.

Improved Worker Views

The Worker views have been updated to enable more convenient management of Workers and troubleshooting of potential issues in your unattended automations, especially in cases where there are multiple self-hosted Workers or groups involved.

The new views have been structured to provide more information about how the Worker is used in different Processes, Steps, and Groups, in addition to sorting and filtering of data, which helps you to stay on top of operations. Also, the user experience of linking new Workers and managing groups has been improved.

Other improvements and bugfixes

• The parallel execution limit in steps is no more limited by the Worker group size
• Autoremove option has been added to the group link tokens, enabling better management of temporary execution environments
• The rare case of scheduler double triggering process runs has been fixed
• UX improvements to the Vault UI
• The bug where VSCode was unable to get secrets when "Prevent viewing Vault secret values" was enabled has been fixed

As always, we in Robocorp would be most interested to hear what you think about the update, so don't hesitate to contact us in the community Slack!

Maintenance release that brings a bunch of security and bug fixes.

Updates

• Updated default RPA Framework version to 24.1.2

Bugfixes

• Fixed race condition in diagnostics dialog that caused soft lock
• Several security updates to dependencies

To address common security and compliance policy needs encountered often in different organizations, in this update, we are introducing a control to Vault secret visibility on the UI, the possibility to provide a reason for stopping Process Runs for auditing purposes, and new audit log events.

Organization Privacy & Compliance settings

To enable the new features, we have added two new options under the "Privacy & Compliance" tab in the Organization settings. These settings can be accessed by the Organization Owners and Admins.

Vault Secret Visibility

By toggling the "Prevent viewing Vault secret values", vault secrets won't be visible to users after creation from the UI. This can prevent leaking of secure credentials by accident (by e.g. in a screen share) and can be a requirement in IT security policies.

Process Run Stop Reason

By toggling the "Require a reason for stopping a Process Run", users need to provide a reason when stopping process runs manually. This will add the reason to the audit log event regarding stopping the run and is useful for e.g. SOX compliance.

New Audit Log Events

We have added User login (with IP address) and SSO mapping change events to the audit log to cover common security policy and auditing needs.

As always, we at Robocorp would be most excited to hear your thoughts about the features! Feel free to contact us in Slack or other channels if you have any feedback in mind.

Have you tried ReMark💬, our generative AI assistant that helps developers deliver value (bots!) faster? One of the early users said, "Something that used to take me 1 hour to do now takes me 10-15 minutes". Don't miss out on this significant shift in developer productivity. ReMark💬 is available for free here.

The most recent update makes the use of ReMark💬 easier, especially when working on multiple things at the same time. We added conversations. The new left sidebar will keep your conversations in order. As ReMark💬 uses previous messages and responses to answer your questions, remember to hit the "New Chat" button to start fresh when you are changing topics.

Features

• Organise chats with ReMark💬 in conversations
• Rename and delete conversations
• Stop text generation button when ReMark💬 is answering
• Thumbs up and down buttons to give feedback on the quality of answers

Updates

• Better error messages in cases when OpenAI API returns an error

• Library RPA.Robocorp.Storage (robocorp-storage 0.3.2): Fix bug when retrieving assets containing spaces in their names.

• Library RPA.Browser.Selenium (#1035; rpaframework-core 11.0.5): Fix chromedriver download issues with Chrome 115 and over.

• Adds the ability to the Worker to check for the rcc executable in the Workers Common Path
• If rcc executable isn't found in either path (the instance path & the Workers Common Path), it will download it as it did before
• This will provide a more reliable determination in use cases involving Setup Utility

Have a good day!

• Issues with launching Setup Utility are now fixed - missing required entities caused the app to freeze in certain situations
• Everything should now be ensured in the bootstrap sequence
• Upgrading to the former version (v0.15.0), shouldn't cause any problems
• Upgrading to the latest version is always recommended

Have a good day!

• Library RPA.Browser.Selenium (#1021; rpaframework-core 11.0.4):

• Correctly handles and downloads a valid existing webdriver version when there’s a need for one.

• Ability to provide a default browser binary location with the RPA_SELENIUM_BINARY_LOCATION environment variable. (useful when the webdriver isn’t able to automatically detect and start your system browser)

• Portal example taking these into use: here

• Library RPA.Browser.Playwright: Renders documentation for robotframework-browser==17.1.0.

• Service Helper v1.11.2 is recommended

• Go to Internal Status page and upgrade Service Helper

• Latest Service Helper sets the correct permissions for log on service, you don't need the last steps in Setup Utility anymore when adding a new Windows Worker

  • Checking if the user already has a worker designated to it - one worker per user; if the user has already a worker, a new worker is rejected

  • Enable/Disable video stream/data transfer is now possible directly from Setup Utility

  • Test the RDP Connection by opening one directly from Setup Utility

  • Adding a new Windows Worker is prefaced by an automatic profile deployment to the user - the current profile from the Admin account is used for the deployment - as such, the proper rcc environment is propagated to all users

  • Manually deploy the current profile to a desired user account from Profile Management

  • Reinforced clean up after Worker is removed - deleting known files from known locations

• Fixed the Submit Issue problems

• You can now reliably Submit Issues to us and we thank you for them :)

• Improvements in the UI/UX in certain areas of the app

• Download from here and check our updated documentation here

Have a splendid day! 🎉

• Library RPA.Robocorp.Storage: Takes into use robocorp-storage 0.3.1 and replaces the limited generic keywords with the ones below. (#1016)
• Set Bytes Asset & Get Bytes Asset
• Set Text Asset & Get Text Asset
• Set JSON Asset & Get JSON Asset
• Set File Asset & Get File Asset

⚠️ Breaking changes: Old Set Asset & Get Asset keywords are gone, please replace them with one of the pairs above.

24.0.0 - 18 Jul 2023

Other noticeable past releases

23.5.2 - 29 Jun 2023

• Library RPA.Robocorp.Storage: Add support for using Assets in VSCode

23.5.1 - 28 Jun 2023

• Library RPA.JavaAccessBridge:
• Update and pin java-access-bridge-wrapper to version 0.14.1

23.5.0 - 27 Jun 2023

• Library RPA.JavaAccessBridge:
• Update java-access-bridge-wrapper to version 0.13.0
• Add keyword Print Locator Tree

23.4.0 - 22 Jun 2023

• Add new library RPA.Robocorp.Storage for managing assets within Asset Storage in Control Room. (#957)

Updates on Robocorp Code

• The logging from robocorp.tasks/robocorp.log is now integrated directly into VSCode (ROBO TASKS OUTPUT view).
• Note: Requires robocorp.tasks 2.1.2, robocorp.log 2.3.0 and Robocorp Code 1.7.0.
• Elements which have a location can now be clicked to open the related file directly inside of VSCode.
• The terminal view can now also show entries logged from robocorp.log debug|warn|info|critical and not just stdout/stderr.

Other noteworthy changes in Robocorp Code:

• Fixed issues in Run Task / Debug Task code lenses (launching robocorp.tasks):

• Robot environment properly used when robot is available.

• The input work item is properly selected when available.

• If multiple entry points in the same file were available the selected one will be run.

• If a robot.yaml has preRunScripts they'll be run prior to launching.

Noteworthy changes in robocorp.log:

• Added robocorp.log.debug (so, there's one more level available to log messages).

• It's possible to filter log levels by using setup_log(log_level='debug|info|warn|critical') (so that log levels filtered out won't even be added to the log.html).

• It's possible to also redirect to sys.stdout or sys.stderr the messages added with log.debug, log.info, log.warn and log.critical by using setup_log(output_log_level='debug|info|warn|critical') along with setup_log(output_stream={'debug': 'stderr'}) (note that the current default is just redirecting critical calls to stderr).

• Add new library RPA.Robocorp.Storage for managing assets within Asset Storage in Control Room. (#957)

Workforce Agent Core v6.32.2

• Fixes an issue where worker executor was left running after the connection to Control Room was already lost
• Fixes an issue where keyboard interrupt or SIGINT would exit the application with exit code zero

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

Today we are releasing Asset Storage for your bots! It’s a highly convenient way to persistently store data and configurations you might need when setting up or operating your attended or unattended automations.

The Asset Storage stores data on a workspace scope and can be used either via UI, API, or with Keywords directly from the Robots, and supports different data types, e.g., Text, JSON, and Files.

There are endless use cases in which the feature can be helpful; your imagination is the limit! Here are some examples we have heard from our users:

• Managing configuration data across automations in a centralized way instead of multiple environment variables in process steps (e.g. e-mail lists used by the robots)

• Sharing common input data across multiple processes (e.g. Excel sheet that multiple robots process different parts from)

• Storing user-facing reports that are updated by multiple processes (e.g. Excel sheet that is updated by multiple different processes)

• Storing process operational data that the work items are not suitable for due to their transactional nature

• Storing non-process items, like development guides, documentation, and company practices

• Storing LLM prompt templates to be used by the robots with large language models, allowing the iteration of prompts without deploying the bot

The Asset Storage is designed for non-sensitive data that needs to persist beyond a single process or assistant run, and the Vault should be used to store sensitive data like credentials instead.

How to use

Control Room UI: Asset Storage is enabled by default, and you can access it from the navigation by selecting "Assets" in the menu. In the Assets view, you can create new assets or modify the content of old assets.

API: Assets can be used with the workspace API; please see the available actions from the API documentation under "Asset Storage".

Keywords: To utilize Assets from robots, we have created simple-to-use keywords for convenient workflows. Please see the library documentation.

For the full description of the feature, please see the documentation page. As always, we at Robocorp would be most excited to hear your thoughts and feedback about the features, and if you have interesting use cases in mind, please share them with us!

Added System Toolbox to fix the most common system-level settings

Detection if the user is an administrator and hides features that cannot be used.

Submit Issue is now available:

• Submit Issue creates the report as Generate Report & sends that as attachment

• The report package will still be available for the user locally

Fixes to the Windows Desktop Worker setup:

• Fixed issues with User & Domain

• Added ability to test user credentials

Download Robocorp Setup Utility from our download site.

Workforce Agent Core v6.32.0

Fixes an issue with desktop setup when "Do not signout after run" option was used. The agent core was left running even after the execution.

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

We're excited to announce our new automation framework for Python automations – simply called robocorp. The release brings the experience of developing Python automations on par with Robot Framework on our platform. The project templates in our VS Code extension have been updated to use the new framework and leverage its capabilities.

Check out our blog post for in-depth story about the new features, or view and read the summary below.

Features

• New @task Decorator: Any method decorated with @task becomes runnable, and can thus be scheduled or otherwise managed as a part of a Process or Assistant in Control Room.
• Visual and Autogenerated Logs: We've brought the loved logging features from Robot Framework to Python, all without you having to write a single line of code. Furthermore, you can now control the logging with ease, suspending logs for sections dealing with sensitive data in several different ways.
• New Robocorp Automation Libraries: While our rpaframework libraries are based on Python, we wanted to enhance the developer experience for those choosing to work on Python exclusively. The new robocorp automation libraries roll out focusing on common automation tasks (Excel, browser, APIs) and interacting with Robocorp Control Room (such as Vault, Asset Storage, Work Items).
• New Python Templates in VS Code and Portal: Easiest way to start using these new capabilities is through the new Python templates in VS Code. They are already available, for example have a look at Playwright Browser automation template.