Release date: 11 November 2019

What’s New

This release graduates key features in handling end to end business processes, introducing support for processes that require logical fragmentation or human intervention. With this new functionality, workflow execution can now be suspended and resumed at a later time – not necessarily on the same machine. Among other things, this paves the way for intuitive and easy invoice processing, exception handling and performance reviews. We set the stage for automating complex processes that either rely on the completion of other processes, or require approval or validation, all this with no waste in terms of resources while waiting for process resumption. Learn more about it here.

Don't worry, we've introduced a new project template in Studio called Orchestration Process, and a brand new set of activities that allow the smooth fragmentation of your workflows. Read more about how to build an Orchestration Process and best practices here.

Code Quality with Workflow Analyzer

Workflow Analyzer checks your current workflow or project against a number of configured rules to determine if best practices are met. For simplicity, we merged project Validation into the Analyze function, so you can check for errors and best practices at the same time.

Validation issues and rule violations are both displayed in the Error List panel, the latter comes with recommendations of fixes to be made to the file or project.

Workflow Analyzer comes with command line support for integrating its validation and analysis features in CI/CD processes as well. Read about Workflow Analyzer here.

Studio Activities Extensibility

With the UiPath.Activities.API SDK package available on the Official feed, you can extend the functionality of your custom activities by building your own Activities Project Settings, Custom Workflow Analyzer rules, and Custom Wizards, all of which can be later integrated with Studio.

Licensing

The Studio activation process has gotten a revamp too, making it seamless and more user-friendly, doubling down with the possibility to view or edit your licensing details directly from the UI.

More good news is afoot - if Studio is licensed locally, no additional license is consumed in Orchestrator. Furthermore, each time you create a Studio or StudioX Robot, you can specify if it uses an external license or not. Oh yeah, and while we were here we also renamed the Development type of license to Studio, to avoid confusion.

User Experience

Studio also sports a cleaner look and feel, with new icons for buttons in the ribbon, additional options in the Backstage Settings tab, and a new color for highlighting activities. In addition, you can find Help links easier using the new shortcut in the Studio ribbon. As a whole this ensures a more comprehensive user experience. Read about the user interface here.

A revamped and redesigned UiPath Platform Installer is here to get you up and running with all the new features of UiPath Orchestrator, Studio, and Robot quickly and easily. Along with the new interface is simplified installation of your multi-node Orchestrator and an easily customizable installation of Studio and Robot.

Command Palette

Finding certain elements part of your project is now easier with the Command Palette feature, which can be opened using the F3 or Ctrl + Shift + P keyboard shortcuts.

In one single place, you can search in all project files and add an activity to your workflow, jump to a certain file or activity, and use fuzzy search to find files, activities, variables, arguments, imports, dependencies and more. These functionalities are available with Command Palette and its Add activity, Universal search, Go to file, and Jump to activity options. The Command Palette and all of its options are detailed here.

To add activities to workflow use the Plus sign in the Designer panel, or navigate through items in the Activities panel and press Enter. Check the documentation for more info.

Use the Send Feedback feature to let us know what you think about Studio, suggest new features or report a bug. Your feedback reaches our product team directly and may be integrated in future versions. However, please keep in mind that the Send Feedback feature should not be used in cases where you require assistance from our support team. Learn more about this here.

Debugging

The debug-first approach in Studio bundles the Debug File or Debug Project and Run File or Run Project options under one button in the ribbon, encouraging continuous debugging of workflows.

The Locals panel now shows the values for arguments, the properties of the current and previously executed activity all in a cleaner design. The values of variables and arguments can be modified from this panel when debugging is paused. Right-click a variable or argument in the Locals panel and add it to the Watch panel to continuously monitor its value throughout the debugging process.

The Immediate panel inspects data by evaluating expressions you define during the debugging process. At the same time, you can monitor the execution of activities, containers and project files from the Call Stack panel and double-click to jump to the activity which threw an exception. Read more about debugging here.

Breakpoints have been enriched with the possibility to add conditions, a hit count and to log a message when hit. In this way, you can set a condition for when the debugging process to be paused if the defined expression is evaluated to true. The hit count specifies the number of times the condition must be met before the execution breaks. Simply hover over a conditional breakpoint or tracepoint in the Breakpoints panel to view its condition. Read more about breakpoints, tracepoints and the Breakpoints panel here.

Activities can now be tested either inside the workflow using the Test Activity context menu option, or from the Activities panel by creating a test bench.

Run to this Activity and Run from this Activity context menu options start debugging the workflow to and from a certain activity. Read more about these actions here.

Use the Restart ribbon option to restart the debugging process from the first activity in the process or the activity from which the Run from this Activity option was triggered.

The new Step Out action finishes the execution of the current activity and returns to the level of the container, pausing the debugging process.

Whenever an exception is encountered during debugging, you can Break, Ignore the error and Continue. The Retry option re-executes the previous activity, and throws the exception if it's encountered again. These actions are now available in the Debug tab, and detailed here.

Details about the thrown exception are displayed in the Locals panel. The activity which threw the exception is highlighted in red, in the Designer panel. Read more about the Locals panel here.

Activity Project Settings

Use the Activities Project Settings window to change activity default properties at a project level. You can configure a set of values for debugging, and another set of values for when the project is run from Studio, the Robot Tray or Orchestrator.

The Activities Settings are available for UIAutomation and System activities. Read more about Activities Project Settings here.

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.

Orchestrator Resources

A new panel in Studio, Orchestrator Resources can be used for loading assets, queues and available processes from Orchestrator, provided that the Robot is connected to Orchestrator. The Orchestrator Resources panel loads items from both Classic and Modern Folders, and brings the possibility to switch between multiple folders and subfolders.

Localization

As a continuation of our efforts to reach out to the entire world and make automation a language everyone can speak, the entire platform is now available also in Simplified Chinese, Korean, German, German, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), and Turkish.

Improvements

The Output panel has been enriched with the Export Logs button, which exports all or a certain batch of logs into a .txt file, together with timestamps and error message details. Read more about this here.

We made improvements to GIT integration and added SSH support for cloning a repository. Check the documentation for more details.

The Add to Source Control shortcuts part of the status bar are now available in the project’s context menu as well.

The Copy to GIT shortcut is now available in the Studio status bar. In addition, the bar comes with the additional option of switching branches, together with shortcuts for committing and pushing changes. Check it out here.

Studio now remembers previous preferences in terms of checking out versioned files by simply selecting a checkbox in the source control prompt window. This is detailed in the documentation here and here.

The Activities Root Category is now memorized in the Publish window for libraries.

Activities from read-only files can now be copied to another workflow or a .txt file.

Within the Project panel, you can now drag files from one folder and drop them to another project folder.

The Auto Arrange context menu option for flowcharts allows you to automatically arrange activities following the logic of each connector.

The Project panel now shows all project files by default and after publishing, the Info window displays the files that were packaged.

The Open File Location context menu option in the Project panel opens the local folder containing the selected file.

Hover over an activity in the Activities panel to view the package it belongs to in the tooltip, or group activities by packages. Find out how to do this from here.

Annotations for arguments used in a library are now displayed as tooltips in the activity's Properties panel. Read more about this here.

Studio now exposes additional data to activities: the authentication token and theme settings. This allows for more capability when building custom activities.

Continuing our never-ending efforts on extensibility, Studio has been enriched with the possibility of opening .xlsx, .csv, .json, .txt and other types of files directly from the Project panel, with the default program. Learn how to use this from here.

The Rename context menu option can be used for folders and files, including those captured in Invoke Workflow File activity. Read more about this documentation.

New sequences, flowcharts, state machines, exception handler templates, and folders can be added directly from the Project panel context menu. Check the documentation for more info.

We’ve added several keyboard shortcuts to make Studio and its panels more accessible. Find out all about these keyboard shortcuts here.

Use Shift + Enter to add a new line in an activity input text field or Expression Editor. The Enter key saves the text that you inputted.

The Reset Settings button can now reset the list of favorites from the Activities panel.

When creating variables or arguments directly from the properties of an activity, the custom namespaces containing the type used as generic are automatically imported. Previously, the namespaces needed to be imported from the Imports panel.

Dock or float annotations by default using the new toggle in the Design settings tab of the user interface.

Studio can be configured to Keep Last Opened Tabs or Open Main Entry Point when reopening a project so you can continue from where you left off. Find out how from here.

The System.Data.DataTable is now a default type of variable or argument. This means that this type is available by default in the Variables and Arguments panels. Read more about the Variables and the Arguments panels.

The Edge Extension is now a full-fledged feature in Studio, meaning that it no longer is marked as Experimental. Read all about the Edge Extension and how to install it here.

The Agent Process Improvement template has been renamed to Trigger Based Attended Automation. Read about this template here.

We’ve updated our project.json schema to a newer version. See here what this means.

Known Issues

• UI Automation activities cannot be used in Orchestration processes unless they are isolated in a sequence that does not use Persistence activities.
• Remove Unused Variables does not work for variables with the same name, but in different namespaces.
• Projects containing a variable of a type declared in more than one namespace cannot be published.
• If you reverse the connector between two activities in a Flowchart and then use Toggle Breakpoint action, the breakpoint is visible only in the Breakpoints panel.
• The Workflow Analyzer rule ST-DBP-020 Undefined Output Properties is improperly triggered for variable combinations.
• Dictionary Key and Value types are not evaluated, but the value of the dictionary object itself is when used with Create Test Bench action.
• When upgrading from Studio v2018.2 or earlier where a custom installation directory was used, any changes in your nuget.config file will not persist through the upgrade.

Bug Fixes

• The Output panel no longer expands to half of the width of Studio while in debug, on machines where a fresh install was performed and the layout size was not previously defined.
• Deleting the .local folder while the project is opened in Studio resulted in an error when attempting to close Studio.
• The New Service ribbon button was unresponsive if the local copy of the SVN or TFS-versioned project was opened in Studio, and the project.json file was checked out.
• Fixed an issue that allowed incomplete or invalid project paths to be validated at process creation if a project directory already existed in that location.
• Checking out a remote branch with the same name as the local branch resulted in a detached branch state.
• Fixed an issue that prevented Studio from displaying the default value of an argument in the Show Changes window.
• Fixed an issue that prevented icons in the Project panel from updating when setting a Global Handler in a newly created project.
• The order of a sequence of activities is now properly kept if you copy them to another sequence.
• Fixed an issue that caused the project to enter an infinite loop at runtime if the Global Handler file contained an activity that threw an exception and the result argument was set to Continue.
• An error was thrown if you copied a sequence with an array of custom classes to another file, although the variables were properly displayed in the Variables panel.
• Search terms added in the Project or Snippets panels were improperly persisted when opening new projects in the same Studio instance.
• Fixed an issue that prevented the project.json file from updating with some arguments, and thus they were missed when publishing with UiPath.Studio.CommandLine.exe.
• Fixed an issue that allowed the user to create a variable using double-type characters and then convert it into an argument.
• When the user selected and deleted several activities in a Try Catch block, some activities from another expanded block would be removed as well
• Libraries that contained M and C as first segments were invalid. This was due to the fact that the generated namespace - abbreviated as mc - is a namespace already in use by Microsoft.
• Fixed an issue that caused the Locals panel to be emptied out when Set Web Attribute, Get Attribute, Get Position, and Get Text activities hit an exception, and Slow Step was used.
• Fixed an issue that caused an error when moving a new file to a new folder part of a library in a SVN or TFS repository.
• Users are now able to perform copy actions from inside the designer on read-only documents.
• Fixed an issue that prevented GIT credentials from being persisted when pushing a project from a local repository to a remote one.
• We’ve made several fixes related to libraries. It is recommended to republish your libraries to benefit from them.
• The Output panel displays log timestamps by the millisecond, making it easier to read them. However, if two logs are generated at the same time, they might not be displayed in order.
• After changing the language and restarting Studio, Cursor Position, and other details displayed when using the Indicate on Screen, part of Click activity are now correctly translated.
• Fixed several issues pertaining to validating and publishing libraries from Studio.
• Files could not be deleted, renamed, or created if the project.json had not been checked out from the SVN or TFS repository. Modifications could be made on files that were not referenced in the project.json.
• Fixed an issue that prevented variables from being renamed in all occurrences if the letter case was preserved.
• In some cases, the .screenshots folder was not included when checking in projects to a TFS repository.