About Widgets
A Widget refers to a plug-in integrated with the UiPath Assistant holding a functionality, for example, the Apps Widget.
Installing Widgets
There are two main ways of installing a widget in the UiPath Assistant:
Downloading The Widget
Widgets built by UiPath are distributed via the Official Feed while custom ones are published to the Orchestrator's Library as a .nupkg
file. In both cases, based on the governance policies, they are downloaded and installed in the UiPath Assistant.
The procedure to download a Widget goes through the following steps:
- UiPath Assistant reaches out to Automation Ops to fetch the Governance Policy.
- The UiPath Assistant looks in the Orchestrator Library Feed for the requested Widget.
- If the Widget is not found there, the Official NuGet Feed is used.
If both feeds are allowed, the UiPath Assistant prioritizes the Orchestrator Library Feed over the Official NuGet Feed.
- Widget is downloaded and added to the UiPath Assistant.
Note:
In order to see a new widget, you need to Quit and restart the UiPath Assistant or sign out and sign back in.
Manually Adding The Widget In The UiPath Assistant
To manually add a Widget to the UiPath Assistant, you need the .js
compiled file. If the Widget is already built in a .js
file, simply drag and drop it on the UiPath Assistant homepage, else, you need to build the Widget first as per the instructions found here.
Note:
For users to be able to drag and drop the
.js
file in the UiPath Assistant, Governance Policies have to allow the use of Custom Widgets.
Widget Governance via Automation Ops
Widget Governance allows you to manage user access to Widgets. For more information, check out the Creating Governance Policies documentation.
The policy you create for the UiPath Assistant allows you to:
- Choose if you allow users to install their own custom widgets.
- Choose if you want to use the UiPath Official widget feeds. If you choose yes, the widgets will be downloaded from either the official feed or your Orchestrator libraries feed. If you choose no, then only the Orchestrator library feeds will be enabled.
- List the widgets that you want your users to have access to by simply adding the name and the version of the NuGet package.
Note:
If you set the governance policy to not allow custom widgets, users are not able to add custom widgets via drag and drop and are only able to install widgets if they are deployed via Orchestrator or from official feeds. Additionally, if you choose to not allow both custom widgets and official feeds, users only have access to widgets published in the Orchestrator feed.
Widget Governance without Automation Ops
When UiPath Assistant is not governed via policies set in Automation Ops, or the policy cannot be applied, the agent-settings.json
configuration is used. If neither of those can be used, the Assistant uses a default policy which contains the latest versions of Marketplace and Apps Widgets.
This can be modified by opening the agent-settings.json
located in C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\UiPath
and adding the defaultNugetWidgetConfig
property under the agent
tag.
agent-settings.json
, make sure to also configure the expiration date.
"defaultNugetWidgetConfig": {
"widgets": {
"UiPath.Marketplace.Widget": "1.0.0"
},
"enableOldWidgets": true,
"enableFallbackFeed": true,
"expires": "2100-01-01T00:00:00.000Z",
"policy": "My custom default policy"
}
Note:
If a policy was downloaded from Automation Ops and the settings in
agent-settings.json
are modified, for the local policy to apply, you need to wait for the already downloaded policy to expire.
Updated about a year ago