Blue Prism 6.4: November 2018

Intelligent Automation Skills provide a new mechanism that enables appropriately certified partners to build and distribute skill packages that can then easily be imported into Blue Prism and used within a process automation. A Skills package will contain a web API definition but can also include any number of objects, processes, and credentials to support the use of the API definition.

The following changes have been made to Blue Prism to facilitate this change:

• A new package type of BPSKILL has been introduced that can be imported into Blue Prism using the existing Import function.
• A new Skills > Management option has been added to the System tab that lists all imported skills and provides controls to enable, disable, and find references.
• A Skills toolbar has been added to Object Studio and Process Studio that provides access to all enabled skills.

A new Web API capability provides a configuration interface for natively interacting with systems and services that provide published HTTP APIs. This allows Blue Prism to interact with these services to either provide data to, or to consume the data or services provided by these external systems within an automated business process. The features provided by the Web API functionality allow the most common services to be automated by Blue Prism. Additionally, these capabilities can be extended to cater for bespoke or more complex data structures and authentication mechanisms, through the use of code stages.

The following changes are applied as part of this feature:

• A new Web API Services option has been added in the System tab for configuring Web API definitions.
• A new Web Connection Settings option has been added in the System tab to enable URI-specific connection settings to be defined.
• New credential types have been added to Credential Manager to support the authentication methods used in API requests.
• New permissions for importing, managing, and viewing skills can be assigned to user roles.

For more information about using and configuring the Web API Services feature, see Web API Services.

A number of user actions are now subject to additional auditing. These include:

• Changes to schedules, such as updates to start and end times, and schedule frequency.
• Changes to the 'Defer to' time of a pending item.
• Updates to session variables.
• Manual archiving and restoring of sessions.
• Manual deletion and retries of queue items.
• Updates to scheduled tasks such as changes to initial values, deletion of tasks, and adding new tasks.

The existing Browser Integration functionality has been updated to include native support for automating web pages and applications, accessed using Firefox. To facilitate this, a new browser extension is provided that allows Blue Prism to interact with Firefox, so that business processes that rely on interaction with this browser can easily be modelled.

As part of this feature, the Blue Prism installer has been updated to enable the installation and removal of the extension.

For more information about the Blue Prism browser extensions, see Native Chrome and Firefox integration.

A number of database improvements have been made:

• Work queues – Performance has been optimized when loading work queue data and statistics. In addition to this, performance has been improved when working with queries used by the following Work Queues business object actions:
  • Delete Processed Items
  • Get Completed Items
  • Get Exception Items
  • Get Locked Items
  • Get Pending Items
• A further improvement in this area reduces the time taken to retrieve items from a queue based on Item Key filters.
• Schedules – Queries on schedules have been optimized to improve performance in the following areas:
  • Schedule triggers
  • Schedule log entries
  • Task sessions

A new optional setting has been added to scheduled tasks that adds an artificial delay after processing a task. This provides the ability to add a pause between tasks and could be used to allow actions that affect the state of the runtime resource (such as Login or Log out) to complete before subsequent actions are performed and avoid errors such as Command not valid at this time – resource stopping.

Blue Prism can now be deployed in environments that utilize contained databases hosted on Microsoft SQL Server. To use a contained database, the database must first be manually created.

For further information, see the Contained databases.

A new Connection Type, SQL Server (Custom Connection String), has been added to the Connection Configuration screen to allow users to explicitly define the SQL connection string to use when connecting to a supported database. This option can be used when connecting to Azure databases using Active Directory integrated authentication.

The following upgrade issues have been addressed:

• If the Process Administrator role already had the Test Process and Test Business Object permissions, prior to upgrading to 6.3, an error would occur whilst mapping these roles to the latest roles introduced in 6.3.
• Users were prevented from creating new groups in the studio tree following an upgrade due to a database permissions issue.

As part of the Multi-Team Environments feature, a Default group is automatically created at the top of the object and process navigation trees when upgrading from a pre-6.3 version of Blue Prism. If the database being upgraded contains an object and/or process group called Default that contains subgroups, the automatically created default group will be named Default (1). This ensures the structure of the object and process hierarchy is maintained following the upgrade.

The built-in default groups can still be easily identified by the (Default) suffix.

The default timeout that an application server applies when waiting for a runtime resource to respond has been increased from 10 to 60 seconds. This reduces the likelihood of resources incorrectly appearing offline.

A related fix has been applied that ensures connections between an application server and resource are not unnecessarily kept open when a response from the resource has not been received.

Loading times have been reduced for the Schedules and Schedule Timetables screens in the Control tab.

Users with import permissions can now overwrite existing objects and processes when importing a release, object, or process. Previously, the edit permission was required in addition to import when overwriting objects and processes on import.

The dashboard tile data source list has been updated so that only custom stored procedures prefixed “DS_” are available for selection if the schema to which it belongs matches the default schema of the SQL account used by Blue Prism to connect to the database.

When automating Internet Explorer it is now possible to spy and interact with an element, displayed in an IFrame, that is hosted on a different domain to the parent site.

A number of changes have been made to improve the performance and resilience of environment-wide communication.

In particular, resource availability monitoring checks no longer impede communication responsiveness between resources and clients. This reduces the likelihood of delays in connecting to recently started and available resources; and reduces the likelihood of schedules failing as a result of resources being incorrectly reported as offline.

The efficiency of connection retries to available resources has been improved to ensure connection attempts occur promptly following a disconnection.

Performance has been improved when creating sessions in Control Room using drag-and-drop.

The frequency of instructional connection checks from interactive clients and Schedulers to runtime resources has been reduced from every second to every ten seconds to improve the efficiency of TCP communications.

The Password field in the Credential Details dialog now accepts multi-line text so items such as private keys and certificates can be supported.

An issue that caused the installation of Blue Prism to fail if the Default value of the Chrome Browser Extension registry key was already set, has been addressed.

An issue where the DBO schema was inappropriately specified in upgrade scripts has been resolved.

Sorting queue data in Control Room by the Resource column no longer results in an error.

Changes have been made to the navigation tree functionality in System > Archiving to simplify selection, ensuring the display of session logs follows a logical and consistent approach that supports a structured audit commentary.

Filters applied in the Queues Management screen are now reflected in the output data when queues are exported using AutomateC.

Field names that contain leading or trailing spaces can now be used in collections. Previously, referencing such field names in a process would cause an error.

An issue whereby a space at the end of a process name caused the archiving of session logs to fail has been fixed by automatically appending such process names with an underscore.

This change also introduces a check, applied when creating new processes, that prevents the use of unsupported characters in process names.

An issue that prevented font details being captured when using the BPDiagnostics utility has been fixed.

An issue has been addressed that caused automations being developed or debugged in Object or Process Studio to get stuck in an infinite loop when stepping out of an exception on a referenced page of a process, if the calling page contained a recovery stage to handle the exception.

An error no longer occurs when dismissing the User Account Control elevation requests when selecting Configure from the Blue Prism sign-on screen.

When using Blue Prism in Japanese locale, data items were incorrectly displaying in the Parameters pane in Code stages. Thee parameter list now loads correctly.

A fix has been applied to prevent inconsistent behavior when toggling multiple SOAP Web API Services in the System tab.

The /getdbdocs command has been updated to provide the expected database information

When using Blue Prism native authentication, changing the value of the Passwords cannot match options in the Sign-on Settings now enables the Apply button. Previously, if either setting was updated the Apply button remained inactive.