Release date: 11 November 2019

What’s New

Robot API

We’re giving you the chance to use the Robot in more ways than before. By exposing several API commands, you are able to integrate more functionality in your applications, such as acquiring the processes list, run and pause, monitor, or terminate them. Read more about its capabilities, what it means, and how it can be used.

Parallel Attended Execution

Attended automation reaches new limits with this release. As of now, an Attended Robot can simultaneously run multiple background processes you create in Studio, allowing you to have actions monitored in the background. Besides those, a single foreground process can also be executed in the meantime. This is called Parallel Execution for Attended Robots, no special license is required to enable it, and we’re sure it enriches your relationship with Attended Robots.

The new Background Process template accompanies the Parallel Execution for Attended Robots. Processes that can run in the background should not have activities which require user interaction. Read more about this type of template here.

Improvements

If you fancy managing and running your processes from the command line like a true coder, then we’ve got some good news for you. We’ve completely rewritten the Robot Command Line Interface parser to make it verb-based. New commands were included, obsolete ones got removed, thus generating an easier experience when working with the Robot CLI.

The Robot has gone through some changes. Since it’s not the looks that matter, we focused on improving the way information is displayed. For instance, both background and foreground processes that are running can be seen and managed, unused Orchestrator connections removed at the press of a button, and more. Just head over to the documentation portal for more information.

On top of that, if configured from Orchestrator, Robots automatically download and start processes whenever the Tray is started. This makes for a flawless, continuous automation experience.

The default communication channel between the Robot Executor and the Robot Service has changed from WCF to IPC.

Known Issues

• If the connection to Orchestrator is lost, the license status and processes list are updated only after you interact with the Robot Tray.
• If the UiPath.Executor.exe is configured to Run as Administrator, processes which contain the Invoke Workflow File with the Isolated property enabled throw an exception at runtime.
• A User-Mode Robot is only able to download and install project dependencies if they are found locally or on the Orchestrator instance it is connected to. As such, it is unable to run processes which have dependencies on the Official or Go! Feeds. You can find out more in the Troubleshooting Guide.
• Process execution experiences a slight increase in duration on Community Edition versions 2018.4 and above. You can find out more details in our troubleshooting guide.
• Packages cannot be concurrently installed by the Robot Service if the configured location is the same for all users on that machine. More details can be found here.
• The Robot does not download a new package version if the %UserProfile%\.nuget\Packages folder already contains a package version with the corresponding project .nupkg file in it and one without it. This is covered in our troubleshooting guide.
• The Robot cannot start a process on a Windows Server 2019 machine which is already running several background processes. This occurs if the Robot is configured to automatically download and start processes from Orchestrator.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue that caused the processes execution to fail if connection state errors were thrown beforehand.
• The UPath.settings file was not properly updated if you disconnected a robot while it was connecting to an Orchestrator instance.
• In rare circumstances, local processes were not displayed in the Robot Tray unless you clicked the Refresh button.
• The Robot was unable to connect via Proxy to the target machine over RDP. This happened when the Login to Console option was set to false.
• The Robot did not always lock the console if it was executed on a user that was already logged in but had its screen locked.
• The Robot Tray was not updated correctly if you started the execution of a process and closed it from Studio, and had the Keep in taskbar option enabled.
• Fixed an issue that caused the processes execution to fail if connection state errors were thrown beforehand.
• Workflow files (.xaml) which contained multibyte characters in the name could not be published to Orchestrator.
• A validation method to ensure the LiteDB file is accessible at all times and not become corrupt was introduced. Read more on this page.
• Fixed an issue which caused the Custom Input activity URI to be ignored by the Global Exception Handler.
• The Robot would sometimes fail to connect to console on the user session after a job was executed on a previous session.