Blue Prism 6.2: February 2018

This version of Blue Prism has been certified for use with the Office 2016 editions of Excel and Word. At the time of release, Office 2016 is the version that is provided as a local install when using Office 365.

Native support for UIA has been introduced with the addition of a dedicated Spy Mode and Application Navigator which can be used when creating application models in Object Studio.
The UIA Application Navigator offers three tree-view displays of the automation elements available within the target application, in descending order of detail presented on screen: Raw, Control and Content.

• Raw displays the full tree of automation elements which closely follows the native programmatic structure of an application. This is the most detailed view available
• Control displays elements which show information to the user or enable the user to perform an action.
• Content contains elements which convey information in a user interface, including UI elements that can receive keyboard focus.

UIA offers improvements in speed, accuracy and resilience over Active Accessibility (AA) when creating automations. AA remains as supported spy-mode.

It is now possible to import Releases via the command line. Releases that are imported programmatically will use pre-configured defaults to resolve environment import conflicts. This functionality is intended for use by advanced Blue Prism users.

The automation design validation can now be set to warn or error if a process or object contains an exception type that has not previously been used in the environment. This provides an elevated ability to ensure that only pre-determined exception types can be used. When using this functionality, the following points need to be considered:

• The list of exceptions currently in use in the environment is only generated once the Scan Business Objects action (or Scan Processes) has been performed.
• Exception types now used or imported in objects and process are automatically added to the validated list of permitted exceptions.

A new capability is provided to release database locks which can occur during archiving. The lock can be released by selecting 'Release Archive Lock' from the Archiving screen within the System panel. Once selected, the lock is cleared from the database and an audit entry is created.

When a resource first initializes, if an archive lock is in place, the resource will automatically attempt to clear it.

Users with the Security – Manage Credentials permission can now create and update credentials using two additional AutomateC command line actions – /createcredential and /updatecredential. By default, new credentials will be created with 'all processes', 'all resources' and 'all security roles' permissions. The values of existing credential properties can also be set and updated by using a /setcredentialproperty action.

A number of options have been introduced when exposing processes and objects as web services:

• Document/literal encoding can now be enforced when exposing a web service in the user-interface and also via the command line with a /forcedoclitencoding switch. This will force all actions (including Initialize and Cleanup) to use the specified format. If this enforcement is not selected, the Initialize and Cleanup actions will use RPC encoding, and the encoding for custom actions will be  determined based on whether a collection data type is defined as an input or output parameter.
• The web service address location that will be displayed within the WSDL of the service can now be optionally configured with an override address. This option is configured through use of the  /wslocationprefix command line switch when starting a runtime resource. If no location is set, the resource will continue to be addressed either by the machine (short) name or FQDN as configured under System Settings. The web service address location of a resource can now be specified via an optional /wslocationprefix command line switch. If no location is set, the resource will continue to be addressed either by the machine (short) name or FQDN.
• When calling a process or object which has been exposed as a web service, outputs that are simple types no longer have an empty XML namespace (xmlns=""). For backwards compatibility, users can specify that a process or object using RPC encoding should continue to use legacy name spacing when first exposing the process or object.

It is now possible to specify that a runtime resource should not start a HTTP end-point by applying an additional /nohttp switch to a /resourcepc command. This option should only be used where the resource is not required to expose any web services and does not need to be controlled via the HTTP interface. Once set, HTTP requests to the resource will not get a valid HTTP response.

An additional dashboard tile has been provided (License Information) which measures and displays license entitlement vs usage for concurrent sessions, published processes and resources. Only data relevant to the deployment license is displayed.

The runtime resource HTTP End-point logging capability primarily provided to support Splunk integration has been expanded to allow basic HTTP authentication. This is in addition to token-based authentication.

The responsiveness of several screens and controls has been improved when there are many objects or processes present within an environment, such as when opening an object or process within the designer or interacting with the tree-view in Process/Object Studio. A new loading modal has also been introduced.

The runtime resource start-up procedure now ignores invalid characters within the SSLCert value to address issues whereby copying the thumbprint from the Certificates Store resulted in certificate errors being reported within Blue Prism. Where invalid characters are found, a warning will be written to the event logs on the local device.

Blue Prism licenses are now unloaded from memory when the user account is signed out of the  interactive client. This resolves an issue whereby switching between environments causes the environment to report an incorrect license allocation to that user.

An infinite loop no longer occurs when a schedule has been configured with an execution interval greater than the available window of operation.

Calendars with no working days defined no longer generate an infinite loop when determining the next scheduled execution time.

An issue has been addressed whereby the import of large releases containing calendars and schedules over an application server connection would fail.

The Unlocking Wizard can now be used to successfully unlock failed processes over an application server connection that uses a WCF connection mode.

From and To entries in Audit Logs now display correctly and are converted from UTC to Local time when displayed in the Audit Log viewer (which displays information in the viewing users Local time). This addresses an issue whereby log entries would be incorrectly displayed across different days when viewed in the Audit Log viewer.

The Blue Prism installer now correctly checks that .NET 4.7 has been installed on the device before proceeding.

Image Regions are now successfully detected at run-time even if the top and bottom padding of the image location has been set to 0. Previously, the region would not be successfully located unless the padding was set to a value  greater than 0.

List Regions can now be utilized with the Relative Positioning location search method in Region Editor when creating process automations with Surface Automation techniques.

Element match values are now limited at 32,000 characters, this prevents UI crashes when using the Active Accessibility spy-mode to capture application elements.

It is no longer possible to assign a retired resource to a credential. Retired resources are still visible when editing credentials to which they are currently associated.

Schedule startup parameters can now only be created and edited by users with the corresponding Create and Edit Schedule permissions.

An issue where using the List View to view session logs caused the data to be displayed incorrectly has been addressed.

Group names are now ignored when looking up an object in the group structure by name. Prior to this change, processes/objects calling an object with the same name as the group it was part of would display a Missing Action error in the Action drop-down.