Release Notes

Workforce Agent Core v6.28.1 / Workforce Agent UI v1.2.88.

Changes to the Workforce Agent Core:

• Upgrade RCC to v13.12.0
• Add support for streaming the desktop video to local path
• Improved desktop streamer logging and error handling
• Fix an issue where worker was not sending the run IDs in the state update message to Control Room
• Send worker configuration to Control Room when connection is established
• Update dependencies

A good thing to understand about Workforce Agent is that no matter which execution option you are using; you are always running the Workforce Agent Core behind the scenes, and you can find the detailed changelog for Workforce Agent Core here.

Robocorp Setup Utility is a new application we have developed to simplify the setup process inside companies that are using SSO, have stricter network access, or want to avoid command-line setups 😉

What is the tool for?

• Quickly create and test a profile configuration for your SSO organization

• The tool also helps you through complex setups with network proxies etc.

• Import and switch between profiles

• Note: Our VS Code extension also supports profile imports and switching.

• Setup and run the Local Worker for testing purposes

• Setup Utility will replace the Workforce Agent UI application for the local testing use case

…and on the coming soon list are the Windows Desktop Worker Setups

Download the tool from: https://robocorp.com/download.

You can find guides and documentation on our docs site

We need to perform a mandatory database update on all of our production instances which can have minor impact on the system usage. This can show up as e.g. errors on UI or some API calls failing. This should not however impact any ongoing process runs which should automatically retry any failed orchestration operations etc. Runtime environments for robots runs are not directly impacted at all. Some robot operations like accessing the Vault can be interrupted.

We will be performing these operations on 3rd of May at 10:00-12:00 EEST. The actual update will be performed as a database failover which should be near instantaneous and we expect the impact of the operation to be extremely limited.

Robocorp Assistant 2.0.8

This update contains:

• RCC updated to version 13.12.0 now supports the ROBOCORP_HOME env variable to be a path that contains special characters like diacritics
• Security updates for multiple 3rd party dependencies
• Fixes that should support better the complex network proxy setups

We also released Robocorp Assistant 1.9.3 that contains important security updates as part of the maintenance for v1. This is a kind reminder that Assistant v1 is marked for deprecation.

We will publish security updates to Assistant v1 until the end of April 2023. End of June 2023, we will push the automatic update, at which point the end-users still using version 1 will get a prompt to upgrade.

• Library RPA.Browser.Selenium (#916):
• Takes into use the latest Selenium (4.8.3 at the time of the release) and its logging fixes. (#883)
• Fixes scheme ensuring bug during not provided URLs. (#586)
• Fixes headless mode setting with newer browsers and enables more browser features when running in this mode. (#919)
• Ensures keyword Screenshot works and logs messages as expected. (logs aren’t polluted with raw image data on levels equal or greater than INFO and it returns the final output image path; #920)
• Takes into use the latest webdriver-manager fixes given rpaframework-core 11.0.1.

We are excited to announce our new user experience for the Control Room, which is designed to provide users with a more natural, consistent, and efficient experience. In addition to looking modern, it will help users to stay on top of what is happening in their automated processes, simplifying common usage patterns and speeding up the troubleshooting of exceptions.

One of the main focus points of the redesign was the unattended automation views, which now visualize the processes giving users better visibility of the process structure and work items, including their processing status. With a few clicks, users are now able to get into the data they need and conveniently perform common actions like looking into the task log, terminating a process run, or retrying multiple failed work items.

Process Output Work Items

As a new feature, we have also introduced Process Outputs. These Output-state work items can be used to store data that is conceptually considered the output of the business process. To utilize them, all you need to do is to create work items from the robot in the last step of the process. They can be accessed via the UI and API in the same way as all other work items, and we will be adding more output-specific functionality in the future to help with e.g. integration use cases.

To go with the new user experience and added features, we have also updated our unattended automation documentation along with examples of how to conveniently use the system, which can be found on the documentation site.

As always, we at Robocorp would be excited to hear what you think of these changes, so feel free to contact us if you have anything in your mind!

• Library RPA.Windows (rpaframework-windows 7.3.2; #913):

• Keywords [Double|Right|Middle ]Click will raise ActionNotPossible if the element is not visible during clicking. (thus clicking wouldn’t happen at all)

• Main library and various keywords documentation fixes.

• Library RPA.PDF (rpaframework-pdf 7.1.5) (#914): Fix “TypeError: cannot pickle ‘dict_keys’ object” bug with the HTML To PDF keyword.

Note

This rpaframework version requires at least the following library versions (if you have such dependencies already listed in your conda.yaml), although we recommend upgrading to the latest found in PyPI:

• rpaframework-assistant 2.2.1
• rpaframework-aws 5.2.8
• rpaframework-dialogs 4.0.4 (deprecated)
• rpaframework-google 7.0.2
• rpaframework-pdf 7.1.4
• rpaframework-recognition 5.1.2
• rpaframework-windows 7.3.0

• Library RPA.Windows (rpaframework-windows 7.3.0; #912):
• Our Windows elements recorder (windows-recorder) supports path: strategy display when run with verbosity on. (-v flag)
• Keyword Print Tree now displays the path: strategy locator alongside printed controls and flattened-by-level returned elements.
• Keyword Set Value supports value validation customization through the validator parameter.

Check our visually detailed Portal example in order to learn more about element paths and how to use the recorder: this Portal example

RPA.Assistant (rpaframework-assistant) 2.2.0:

New features:

• Add Text Input now supports Robot Framework validation keywords
• Add Text Input now supports minimum and maximum rows to enable multiline inputs
• Improve how validation errors are displayed. They display beside the input field now, instead of bottom of the dialog.
• Fix checkbox values being strings "true" and "false" instead of booleans.

Workforce Agent Core v6.26.12 / Workforce Agent UI v1.2.85.

Worker API call error handling was improved to validate all responses from Control Room to provide better error messages.

A good thing to understand about Workforce Agent is that no matter which execution option you are using; you are always running the Workforce Agent Core behind the scenes, and you can find the detailed changelog for Workforce Agent Core here.

• Library RPA.Excel.Files

• Made require_open_xlsx_workbook, a method that was accidentally exposed publicly, private again.

• Library RPA.JavaAccessBridge (#908):

• Fixes related to keyword Select Window

• Update to the latest java-access-bridge-wrapper 0.9.7

• Add additional system window verification before using jab.switch_window_by_title

• Library RPA.Database (#899):

• Add support for parameterised sql queries

• Library RPA.PDF (rpaframework-pdf 7.1.3) (#909): Add documentation about PDF merge and split.

Workforce Agent Core v6.26.10 / Workforce Agent UI v1.2.83

This version added a fix for an issue where artifact upload failure raised an incorrect error message and updated worker dependencies.

A good thing to understand about Workforce Agent is that no matter which execution option you are using; you are always running the Workforce Agent Core behind the scenes, and you can find the detailed changelog for Workforce Agent Core here.

This update to Automation Studio is all about solving potential issues users might encounter. The system diagnostics dialogs have been re-designed, and should now better guide users through possible errors and their mitigations. This version also fixes various bugs reported by users who have been doing the first certification course.

Features

• Redesigned diagnostics dialogs with more clear UI, better documentation, and an option to automatically fix issues (where possible)
• Support for showing code comments (#) in visual mode

Updates

• Removed non-functional Safari option in browser preferences
• Selected workspace is now stored per project

Bugfixes

• Export project menu option would always fail
• Manually added code comments would sometimes be removed on project save
• Custom Python environment variables would sometimes prevent running Robots
• Inspector window sometimes out of bounds with multi-monitor setups
• User keywords would not update when return values were added

• New library RPA.Smartsheet (#880):
• Supports getting, creating and updating Smartsheet sheets, as well as downloading attachments.
• Read library documentation for a full list of keywords.

We have now added the capability to the Control Room to view a video feed for unattended process runs. This gives visibility to what is happening during the execution and will help troubleshoot or demonstrate what the robot is doing.

For security, video streaming has a few opt-in steps. Video streaming needs to be enabled per organization, and the feature must be enabled per worker on the local machines.

Once enabled, you can see the video stream under your process step run page. You can view the robot run as it happens or after it has finished. Depending on the network delay, there can be a delay in the streaming.

Video streaming is now available for the new Flex and Enterprise tiers, don't hesitate to get in touch with your Robocorp Customer Success contact to enable the feature.

Check out the documentation: Video stream for unattended runs

New version of Robocorp Service Helper v1.8.1 available from here.

This version adds RCC profile network support for all downloads and fixes an issue where executable could fail on dependency issue.

Workforce Agent Core v6.26.6 / Workforce Agent UI v1.2.80

Changes for the Workforce Agent Core:

• Fixes for http(s) calls when proxy is setup via the RCC profile
• Make sure the stream file upload is using RCC profile network options
• Upgrade RCC to v13.9.2
• Update dependencies

A good thing to understand about Workforce Agent is that no matter which execution option you are using; you are always running the Workforce Agent Core behind the scenes, and you can find the detailed changelog for Workforce Agent Core here.

• Library RPA.PDF (rpaframework-pdf 7.1.2): Light documentation fix and preserved default behaviour with the boxes_flow parameter in the Set Convert Settings keyword. (defaults to 0.5)

RPA.Assistant (rpaframework-assistant ) 2.1.2:

Bugfixes:

• Fix File picker sometimes causing AssertionError: Control must be added to the page first
• Fix Add Next Ui Button callback getting a normal dict instead of a DotDict.

• Library RPA.Browser.Selenium (#859):
• Fixes Set Download Directory keyword: functionality, docs, examples.
• Improves Browser Locators functionality. (referenced by alias:)