Blue Prism 6.5: April 2019

Data Gateways provides a centralized mechanism for pushing data out of Blue Prism for use in external systems for monitoring and reporting, long-term data storage, and to feed machine learning models. System Settings are applied to determine what data will be processed by the Logstash Powered Data Gateways engine, and a configuration defines the outputs to which data will be pushed. Data from session logs, published dashboards, and process stages can be sent to a variety of external outputs – HTTP endpoints, external databases, third-party analysis tools, and flat files – providing flexibility and control over data analytics and storage.

Three new user permissions have been introduced for this feature and provide the necessary rights for regular and advanced configuration, and for managing the Data Gateways engine in the Control Room.

To support this feature, the new Data Gateways internal VBO is now available. It has one action, Send Custom Data, that accepts collections as inputs and sends the data from those collections to the Data Gateways engine.

A number of additional components are required for Data Gateways that are available in a separate installer, Blue Prism Data Gateways Components, available from the Blue Prism Portal.

Data Gateways requires a SQL native user to be created against the Blue Prism database and is only available for Blue Prism databases that can support this.

For full instructions on how to configure and use Data Gateways see Data Gateways.

Work queue snapshots allow metrics relating to work queue performance to be externalized, making it available to business intelligence tools and other reporting software to gain an insight into work queue item and exception volumes. Configurations determine which queues are included in each snapshot and at what frequency the data is captured. Snapshots can then be compared to identify trends and provide a better understanding of queue performance.

Additionally, two new in-product data sources have been introduced which show some of the information in dashboard tiles.

The Blue Prism interactive client user interface and product help are now available in Japanese and Simplified Chinese. When starting Blue Prism, the user interface is automatically presented in the locale of the operating system for the supported language. The required language can also be selected from the login screen.

As part of this enhancement, public holidays for China, Japan, Hong Kong, and the USA are now available in calendars by selecting the required region in the System > Calendar settings.

Support for IPv6 connections has been introduced, allowing Blue Prism to be deployed in environments that utilize IPv6 network protocols for all connections as well as those that use a combination of IPv4 and IPv6.

For more information, see Blue Prism Network Connectivity.

The Tesseract OCR engine has been upgraded to V4.0.0 and is applied to all installations of Blue Prism 6.5.

New options have been added to the system settings that allow users to select select which characteristics of the V4.0.0 engine will be applied.

For further information, see Tesseract v4.0.0.

A new Maximum Attempts option has been added to the Recover stage to prevent an object or process from entering an infinite loop by setting a maximum number of times the stage can be executed. If the maximum attempts limit is reached then the Recover stage will not be used and an exception will be thrown. Exceptions thrown when a Recover stage has exceeded its Maximum Attempts value cannot be handled or bubbled up, meaning that the object or process that is running at the time will be stopped/terminated.

The number of times the Recover stage has been called is reset when the Start stage of the page on which it resides is executed.

The Resolve Import Conflicts screen has been improved so that conflicts discovered during an import are presented in a grid view.

A new user permission – Release Manager – Import Release – has been introduced. To import a release in Release Manager, a user must have this permission as well as the relevant permissions for all the components in that release, such as Import Process, Import Tile etc. This applied both when importing from the File menu, or using the command line.

For new installations, the permission is applied to the built-in System Administrator and Release Manager roles. For upgrades the permission is automatically applied to any user role that already has the View Release Manager permission assigned.

Additionally, the enforcement of import permissions is now repeated on the application server.

Stage names are now automatically assigned a default name that reflects the selected action for scenarios when a name is not manually entered by the user.

When creating a copy of an object or process using the Save as option, users are now presented with a list of destination folders for which they have create permissions.

A new tile, Hours Spent Working Queues, is available for use in dashboards. The tile displays the hours that runtime resource spent working queues in each month during a specified period of time.

The following improvements have been made to Blue Prism auditing functionality:

• Paging and sorting controls have been added to the Process Logs and Audit Logs screens to improve navigation.
• Audit log entries are now created when environment variables are added, edited, and deleted from the within the System tab.
• Toggling the System Setting, Personal Runtime Start Up, now produces an accurate audit log message.
• An issue that incorrectly added events to the audit log when the System > Settings page was opened has been addressed. The raised events suggested that a user had changed a setting when no updates had been made.

The following improvements have been made to scheduling:

• It is now possible to use process alerts with schedules. Previously, when alerts were enabled and a schedule that would generate an alert was triggered, an error was produced.
• The way in which schedules are retrieved from a database has been optimized to improve performance by only holding database connections open whilst schedule data is retrieved.
• Where the scheduler was enabled on an application server, unnecessary connection attempts were being made to private resources. A change has been implemented to prevent such connection attempts as servers do not have permission to run schedules on private resources and are therefore not required.

A number of updates have been made to the license management utility:

• Standalone licenses that cannot be used in conjunction with other licenses can now be added
• Licenses that require activation can now be added and activated using a new wizard
• License validation now ensures that, when using multiple licenses, each one is unique
• The Installed Licenses screen now takes into account any license added or removed by another client in the same environment to prevent licenses being inadvertently removed when two users on different clients are editing licenses at the same time.

The following changes have been made to improve the process of upgrading and creating databases:

• A 'Generate Script' button is now available when creating and upgrading databases through the Connection Configuration dialog that produces the associated database scripts.
• During database creation or upgrade, a progress bar now displays to inform users of the status of the upgrade and show the script that is currently running.

The progress bar may pause during while large operations.

When performing an upgrade to version 6.5 or above, users are given the option to migrate session logs to tables that provide higher performance. If the option to migrate is not chosen data will be left in the current tables. This reduces the need for a lengthy upgrade process and allows session log data to be migrated post-upgrade using a tool available from Customer Support.

For more information, see the Upgrade Notices for version 6.5.

Enhanced application level logging functionality has been added to Blue Prism so that, once enabled, more detailed information about application execution and performance can be accessed to assist when troubleshooting.

For further information, see the Troubleshooting – Logging topic in the in-product help.

A new option has been added to the Blue Prism installer – Google Sheets Automation – that installs the DLLs required to interact with spreadsheets, presented in Google Sheets, via the new VBO.

The following changes have been made to the System > Workflow > Environment Locks screen:

• Pagination has been introduced to improve navigation
• The default filter for the Lock Time column has been changed from All to Today.

The following changes have been implemented in the Control Room:

• Performance has been improved when accessing the control room by ensuring the data required for saved and selected session filters is only requested once.
• The Control Room > Session Management screen has been updated so that retired processes are no longer available from the Process filter drop-down.
• An issue that caused the User filter in Control Room > Session Management to be incorrectly applied, has been addressed.

The following improvements have been made to the Blue Prism Skills feature:

• When deleting a Skill, any associated Web API is now automatically deleted, providing it is not associated with any other Skill.
• The System > Skills > Management screen has been updated so that the format of the Delete and Find References options are consistent with similar controls in the Blue Prism user interface.
• The Skills toolbar incorrectly rendered when re-sized if the scale and layout size was greater than 100% and the Fix Scaling for apps Windows setting was applied. This issue has now been addressed so that the toolbar renders correctly regardless of the layout size.

The following changes have been made to improve functionality when using Blue Prism with Japanese language characters and Windows versions:

• It is now possible to input Japanese characters into a browser application in Chrome using a Write stage.
• An issue that prevented the keyboard entry of Japanese characters into embedded text boxes within a number of stages in Object Studio and Process Studio, has been resolved.
• An issue that caused the wrong window tile to be spied in Unicode applications when using the Japanese language version of Windows has been addressed so that the intended window tiles are now successfully spied.

The auto-archiving feature has been updated to work more effectively in environments with high volumes of data.

If a work queue item is locked at the end of a session, the cleanup process now only marks the item with an exception. Previously this scenario would automatically create a retry for the queue item.

In the Queue Management screen, applying filters of less than 12 hours in the Created column for work queue items was causing all data to be cleared from the table if used in anything other than the local time zone. This issue has been addressed and the filters in work queues now work correctly, regardless of the time zones.

A change has been implemented to address an issue that produced errors when displaying active queues over WCF connections if two control room users attempted to simultaneously change the number of target sessions for a given queue.

An change has been implemented to ensure that carriage returns and line feeds in command replies from runtime resources that are configured to use an SSL certificate are processed correctly by the interactive client and scheduler.

The Session Log viewer UI has been updated to add maximize and minimize buttons and remove the help button.

The Manage Access Rights screen for object and process groups has been updated to stop changes to the Unrestricted/Restricted options being saved if the user clicks Cancel or the X button.

The following improvements have been made to the Blue Prism browser extensions:

• The Chrome and Firefox browser extensions have been updated to improve resilience and stability when attempting to make a connection to a website.
• Get Path data is now available on elements in read stages.
• An issue that caused an out-of-memory exception to occur when running processes and objects that automated applications or web pages presented in Chrome or Firefox has been addressed.
• An update has been made to the Firefox browser extension to address an issue that prevented the Application Modeller from attaching to instances of Firefox that were already running.

A warning message now displays when a user attempts to log in to an environment configured with single sign-on for Blue Prism that has an inaccessible domain.

The Startup Parameters dialog now correctly displays when accessed from the Debug menu in process studio. Previously, attempting to access startup parameters in this way, resulted in an error.

When attempting to edit a locked process from a process stage, users are asked if they want to open the process as view-only instead. Previously, if the user selected 'No' an error would be thrown. This issue has now been addressed and this action now closes the message box.

An issue that prevented processes being renamed on import if the process had the same name as an existing business object has been addressed.

The default value for the Stage logging setting in internal business objects is now Error Only. This applies to all internal business objects apart from Get Next Item in the Work Queues business object, for which the default value remains Enabled.

The Find References functionality in Object Studio now correctly returns references to other actions in the same object that are called from page and action stages. Previously, finding references under these circumstances did not produce any results.

For published objects and processes for which a user does not have edit permissions, the Publish to Control Room check box can no longer be toggled. This is a cosmetic change as, although the user could previously interact with the check box, their permissions prevented them from saving any changes.

An issue that produced an error when attempting to save a collection that contained multiple nested collections with the same name, has been addressed.

It is now possible to save a collection that contains multiple nested collections that have the same name. Previously, attempting to save under these circumstances would result in an error.

An issue whereby some column headers in large nested collections were not being displayed, has been resolved.

An issue that produced an error when attempting to open application modeller after stepping into a child object in a process, has been addressed.

A further change in this area has been implemented to ensure that, when stepping into a stage that uses a shared application model, the parent object is correctly initialized before being called.

An issue that produced an error when attempting to save changes to previously spied elements caused the edited elements to be removed from the Application Modeller. This issue has now been resolved and such changes can now be successfully saved.

When editing a child object that used a shared application model, changes to non-text attributes were not saved and therefore did not update the parent model. This issue has been addressed so that changes to non-text attributes in child objects are now reflected in the associated parent objects.

An issue that produced an error when copying elements from one instance of Application Modeller to another if the first instance was closed before the element was pasted, has been resolved.

An update has been made to ensure that, for application models configured to attach to an existing instance of an application, the Restrict to non-invasive automation techniques setting is correctly applied if the application is launched after failing to attach.

The following Management Information settings, in System > Reporting, are now applied by default for new installations of Blue Prism:

• Collect utilisation and productivity statistics
• Automatically refresh statistics daily

On upgrade, the previously applied settings are maintained.

Using the Process MI tool over WCF connections no longer results in an error.

An update has been made to the Add a Web Service wizard so that FindByThumbprint can be selected as the Find Type for SSL Authentication. Previously, if FindByThumbprint was selected, the Next button remained disabled.

A change has been implemented to ensure that when a Web API definition is configured to use parameters in restricted HTTP headers, the associated values are successfully passed.

When adding SOAP web services, the WSDL definition being imported is now checked to ensure it does not contain unsupported data types. If unsupported data types are encountered, the operation is cancelled.

Passwords for credentials, used for calling web services from Blue Prism, can now accept the colon character.

A number of improvements have been made when working with releases:

• When creating a release that contains a credential, Blue Prism incorrectly attempted to include the Additional Properties values of a credential, resulting in an error. This issue has been addressed so that no attempt is made to include this sensitive data in a release.
• Importing a release containing a schedule that already existed in the database would fail if the incoming schedule contained different tasks to the existing one. This behavior was only observed when importing over a server connection. This issue has been resolved and such releases now import successfully.
• A change has been implemented to ensure that, when importing a release, overwriting an existing published process does not cause the maximum number processes for the associated license to be exceeded.

A message box now displays if a user attempts to create a new database that has the name as an existing database. Users can to select whether they want to overwrite the existing database or cancel the operation.

The Connection Settings node in the System tab now shows as being disabled to users who do not have the System – Web Connection Settings permission enabled for their user role. Previously, although such users were prevented from accessing the node, it displayed as active.

If the word "process" was included in an environment variable Name, Description, or Value field, it would be replaced with "Business Object" when the user navigated away from, and returned to the System tab. This issue has been fixed so the text in environment variables remains as entered.

In the System tab, the Web API > Connection Settings node has been renamed Web Connection Settings.

The System – Web Connection Settings preference has been renamed Business Objects – Web Connection Settings.

Debug sessions that crashed during execution, and therefore were unable to finish, are now automatically cleaned up during the archiving process to prevent unnecessary data being retained in the database.

A change has been implemented to stop published custom dashboards unnecessarily refreshing – and therefore adding items to the event logs – if they do not contain any tiles.

An issue has been addressed that incorrectly positioned the Skills toolbar if it was opened from the View menu in a maximized Process Studio.

An issue that caused an error when high numbers of entries were listed in the runtime resource monitoring window has been addressed so older entries are removed before the limit is exceeded.

Clicking the help icon from the Blue Prism business object Definitions screen now displays the correct help page.

The way in which environmental locks are released has been optimized to improve performance when running multiple sessions with high volumes of data. The change prevents the system from unnecessarily attempting to update environment locks if none are present.

Breakpoints that have the same name are now listed independently when not grouped by page in the Breakpoint Locator. Previously, if breakpoints had duplicate names, only one entry for that name would display in the tree.

When a pool controller is gracefully shut down, the time taken to elect a new pool controller has been reduced.

As part of this improvement, the timeout for keeping runtime resources alive has been reduced from 60 seconds to 30 seconds. This ensures that the resources identify that the connection has closed and pick up the change of controller more quickly.

Deleting pools from the System tab now immediately removes them from the control room without the need to restart the client.

A improvement to the upgrade mechanism has been introduced so that, when upgrading from version 6.5 to a later release, the BP Sever service settings are not reset. This will ensure that the configured details are maintained after an upgrade.

An issue that created intermittent errors when updating the status of runtime resources in the database has been resolved.

An advanced mechanism for managing the NOP communication frequency has been introduced.

A change has been implemented to ensure users are appropriately advised when attempting to run AutomateC commands with an expired password.

An issue that caused an error when the /getauthtoken command was used in AutomateC.exe has been addressed so that the token is now correctly returned.

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

An issue that produced errors when creating processes over WCF: Insecure connections if extended logging was enabled has been addressed.

In the BPDiagnostics utility, Selecting Font > Generate from Installed Fonts no longer results in an error if the Arial or Comic Sans MS fonts are selected.

Serialization in exception stages has been localized so that list separators are correctly validated relative to the locale of the device.

Login Agent now provides a mechanism that can allow an automatic login of a device that requires Ctrl + Alt + Del (formally knows as Secure Attention Sequence (SAS)) to be traversed as part of the login sequence.

In previous versions, Login Agent required the SAS to be disabled, and further attempted to disable the setting locally for scenarios where the devices where not on a domain.

For 6.5, a new Login Agent SAS Proxy service is available which can be instructed to programmatically submit a software SAS to the local machine as part of the configured login process.

Additionally new, but unsupported, capabilities are provided to attempt to locally disable the requirement to traverse the SAS and Login Message as the device reboots.

The Get Worksheet Range as Collection code stage in the Excel VBO now includes an input parameter to determine whether or not a worksheet uses a header.

The Keep Environment Lock parameter has been added to the Release Lock action of this VBO. By default, the parameter is set to false so that locks are deleted when released. If this parameter is set to true, released environment locks are not deleted.

The parameter only affects locks created during the current session – environment locks are not deleted when they are released.