Blue Prism 7.0.1: November 2021

The additional Tesseract third-party prerequisite libraries are now included in the Blue Prism installer. These are required for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in processes where the Read Text with OCR option is selected for a Region element in a Read action. Previously, in deployments using Blue Prism 6.5 or later, processes using OCR failed and a Tesseract system error displayed, informing the user that the program could not start due to missing DLLs.

The setting to run a schedule on the first or last day of the week (by selecting the First or Last option from the On the …working day in calendar drop-down for schedules set to be run weekly) is now correctly saved to the database.

Schedules can now be stopped successfully using the Stop option from the schedule's shortcut menu irrespective of the time zone set for the schedule. Previously, this only worked reliably in environments where the user's operating system on which the interactive client was running was configured to use the UTC time zone.

An issue has been fixed where schedules with the Use time zone option enabled were marked with an asterisk– indicating that there are unsaved changes on those schedules – even though no changes had been made to the schedules. Users are no longer prompted to discard the incorrectly detected changes to be able to navigate to a different tab.

Users are now notified of schedule instances that are skipped if the application server automatically adjusts for daylight savings. Previously, instances scheduled to run during the last hour of the application server’s daylight savings period were suppressed without notifying the users.

When Work Queue data is exported as a report, the time displayed in the Queue Management user interface and the exported Work Queue report is now aligned. Previously, the time displayed in the report reflected daylight saving adjustments.

On the Queues screen in Control Room, the Last Updated field now accurately reflects the date and time the work queue item was last updated. This fixes an issue introduced in Blue Prism 6.7, where this field was incorrectly populated with the date the queue item was created. In Blue Prism 7.0, the correct value was saved to the database, but the field on the screen was incorrectly left blank.

To reduce unnecessary memory usage while running automations, once received from the application server, runtime resources now store a single instance of the compressed process and object XML. Previously, such XML files were stored uncompressed and any previously retrieved versions since the last restart were retained, which caused runtime resources to run out of memory when running large, complex processes.

This is also included in Blue Prism 6.10.3.

To enhance performance, the handling of environment variables has been improved so that only a single shared copy of the data is held in memory on a runtime resource per session. Previously, each sub-process or object within a process retrieved and stored its own copy of the environment variables from the database. This fix also prevents unnecessary repeat queries for environment variables in the database each time a process is executed or an object is called from within a process.

Additionally, the error message that displays when data items reference a deleted environment variable in Studio has been improved to make it more informative to users.

This is also included in Blue Prism 6.10.3.

When clicking between input parameters in a stage in Studio by clicking the parameter name in the Store In fields, all null or empty text fields are now ignored, therefore preserving the original description. Previously, some descriptions were removed when clicking between input parameters.

Previously, session logs were not displayed for users who were not assigned the System Admin role when accessing a SQL database using a schema that was not using the default dbo schema pattern. For example, customschema.IntIdTableType was used instead of dbo.IntIdTableType. This has now been fixed by updating the database query to not take into account the default dbo schema pattern so session logs are now accessible regardless of the schema pattern used.

When starting a runtime resource via the /invisible command line parameter, right-clicking the runtime resource icon in the system tray on the taskbar and then clicking Exit now closes the window. Previously, multiple clicks were required to close the window.

An issue has been fixed for Web APIs that use the OAuth 2.0 (Client Credentials) authentication type, where the client id and client secret were not URL encoded before being sent as part of the access token request. Previously, this issue prevented an access token from being issued from the OAuth 2.0 Authentication Server.

The fix maintains backwards compatibility for any customers that had performed a workaround where they had encoded the client id and client secret themselves before storing them as credentials.

Business objects exposed as web services can now be authenticated via the username in common name format. Previously, the username had to be in UPN (User Principal Name) format.

An issue has been fixed where user roles were incorrectly deleted when the dialog containing the warning message about deleting user roles on the User Roles screen was closed, instead of only when accepted by clicking Yes in the dialog.

Debugging an object that reads from, or writes to an empty collection no longer incorrectly returns validation errors. Previously, running such objects in Process Studio or Object Studio incorrectly resulted in validation errors.

To minimize unnecessary logging on users' systems and thus improve performance, the default NLog logging severity has been reduced for several browser automation and Citrix-related functions The previous logging levels of the updated logs can still be viewed by changing the logging level or adding new NLog rules in the Automate.nlog.config file. For more details, see Troubleshooting - Logging.

Additionally, the NLog logging level severity has been reduced for various log points in ASCR when using the WCF channel. For more details, see ASCR logging.

When attempting to attach to a previously launched browser by using a window title, capitalization is now ignored. Previously, the Attach action failed when the window title did not exactly match the value specified, for example ‘google’ instead of ‘Google’.

The Edge browser extension is now fully installed if selected on the Advanced install screen during Blue Prism installation. Previously, it was necessary to enable the extension separately in the Edge browser once the Blue Prism installation had completed.

This is also included in Blue Prism 6.10.3.

Previously, when attempting to launch a browser immediately after closing it, either in Studio or when running an automation, a browser extension appeared unavailable. This was due to the browser being closed not exiting correctly. This has been resolved by automatically checking if all browser instances have closed every 200 milliseconds for up to 2 minutes when terminating the browser. If the browser does not successfully close, an error message warns the user to ensure all browsers with the Blue Prism browser extension installed are closed before continuing. This message has been previously incorrectly translated in Chinese and has now been fixed.

This is also included in Blue Prism 6.10.3.

Additionally, a mechanism has been added to allow a short pause between a Terminate action and a Launch action, which allows the browser to remove any spawned processes before attempting to launch. The pause has been set to 1000 milliseconds by default and can be configured in the Automate.config file:

<add key="BrowserAutomation.BrowserTerminationMinimumPauseBeforeLaunch" value ="1000"/>

This behavior applies only when the browser is closed via a Terminate action, and not via any other mechanisms, such as PowerShell scripts.

A fix has been applied to ensure that, when entering data into web components in a Chrome, Edge, or Firefox browser, the necessary underlying input event is triggered and the native value setters are used to ensure the event works as expected. The behavior in the application should now be the same both when the web component is worked by a digital worker or by a human using a keyboard and mouse, even in situations where the developers of the web components have programmatically overridden the event.

This is also included in Blue Prism 6.10.3.

When using Application Modeller to attach to web pages in a Chrome, Edge, or Firefox browser, users no longer need to manually append a wildcard to window titles of target pages taken from a collection. This functionality is now consistent with the window title parameter in stage properties where the wildcard is automatically inferred.

This is also included in Blue Prism 6.10.3.

Closures of browser sessions launched from multiple instances of Blue Prism are now correctly detected by the Blue Prism instance which launched the browser session. Previously, when one of browser sessions was closed, the Detach button for that session remained enabled in Application Modeller even after if it was clicked by a user, and the closure of that session was only detected once all browser sessions were closed.

This is also included in Blue Prism 6.10.3.

When automating web pages in an Edge browser, if an element did not exist, an error message incorrectly indicated that more than one matching web element was found. The error occurred in the Application Modeller when using the XPath and CSS Selector web attributes which returned at least one empty element. The correct error message now displays.

Previously, when automating a web page in an Edge browser, if the Verify action in a Navigate stage had the Highlight parameter set to True, the highlighting box would not disappear from the web page after running the automation. This has now been fixed.

An issue has been fixed where, when attempting to launch or attach to a Chrome, Firefox, or Edge browser instance which was previously launched externally and not via Blue Prism, the externally launched browser session of the same type was not reliably detected.

A message now displays on the Server configuration screen when establishing a connection to the RabbitMQ message bus is taking longer than expected and is being attempted again. This is also recorded in the server logs.

An issue has been fixed where changes to the broker password in the Authentication Server Integration tab on the Server Configuration Details screen would persist even after the user had clicked Cancel to discard the changes.

An error no longer occurs when attempting to configure process alerts for Authentication Server users via the shortcut menu on the Security - Users screen in the Blue Prism interactive client.

When a Blue Prism user is mapped to the Authentication Server database, basic Hub permissions are now granted to the user so they have access to the Dashboard and Profile settings pages when they log into Hub for the first time.

Blue Prism native user accounts that have been mapped to Authentication Server accounts via the mapping tool are now set to never expire in the Blue Prism database, because these accounts and their expiry dates are now managed in Authentication Server.

When the Blue Prism Server service is started, if the broker settings have been configured, it attempts to connect to the RabbitMQ Message Broker server. The connection configuration has been updated so that if the Blue Prism Server service stops or is terminated, the connection to RabbitMQ is closed. Previously the connection remained active, which meant user synchronization may unexpectedly continue.

When the Blue Prism Server service is started, it attempts to connect to the RabbitMQ Message Broker server. It will continue to try to establish the connection for 24 hours; after which the attempts will timeout so it will be necessary to restart the Blue Prism Server in order for it to retry to establish the connection. Previously, if a connection to RabbitMQ is not successful, a connection would continue to be attempted for up to 24 hours even if the Blue Prism Server service was stopped before a connection had been achieved.

Credentials used for the RabbitMQ Message Broker when installing Hub can now contain restricted special characters, such as URL encoded characters.