Blue Prism 7.3: December 2023

The Sign-On Settings - Active Directory Domains screen has been updated to support both automatic domain detection and manual domain configuration. The following new options have been added:

• Detect domains automatically
• Manually configure domains

When manual mode is selected, and the user is adding or editing a domain record, the screen now displays the following new fields:

• Domain SID - This is a required field.
• Domain SID Forest name - This is a required field.
• Domain controller mappings - This optional field allows multiple domain controllers to be added.

When automatic mode is selected, the Add and Delete buttons are disabled, and the following fields become read-only and populated automatically:

• Domain name
• Domain SID Forest name

When switching from manual to automatic, any saved domains created in manual mode are retained and used in automatic mode. As long as the domains contain the relevant fields, they will work in both modes.

The U035 audit event has been removed as part of this enhancement.

For more information, see Active Directory domains.

The UI Automation Navigator can now be used to automate Citrix applications. A new NativeWindowHandle attribute has been added as a unique identifier to the UI Automation Navigator.

The Citrix Desktop agent now supports targeting multiple and specific Citrix Virtual Desktops. The Blue Prism Application Modeller includes a field for the Citrix Virtual Desktops instance name in which to specify the desktop name from the Citrix Workspace. If the instance name is provided and the Blue Prism Citrix Virtual Desktops agent is installed and running on the Citrix Virtual Desktops instance, then Blue Prism will direct communication to the specified instance. If the instance name is not provided, Blue Prism will attempt to launch or attach to the first Citrix Virtual Desktop instance it finds that has the Blue Prism Citrix Virtual Desktops agent installed and running.

Citrix Virtual Desktops are accessed through the Citrix Workspace application installed on the runtime resource. These can now be launched and closed using a Navigate stage. This enables users to fully automate applications in Citrix Virtual Desktops without having to manually launch and close the desktop.

The Google Sheets DLL file is no longer included in the Blue PrismEnterprise installer. Users who want to use Blue Prism to create and update spreadsheets in Google Sheets must now download the latest version of the Google Sheets DLL from the Digital Exchange. This ensures that customers develop Google Sheet assets using the latest available DLL file.

The Google Sheets automation option has been removed from the Advanced install page.

The ability to filter environment variables has been added to System Manager. In the filter field at the top of the Processes – Environment Variables and Objects – Environment Variables pages, users can now enter text to filter the list of environment variables. The list is dynamically filtered as text is entered. By default the filter is applied to the Name column. To apply the filter to a different column, users can add in: and the name of the field before the filter text, for example, in:value true.

Users can now also click a column heading to sort the list of environment variables by the values in that column.

An issue has been fixed relating to Active Directory (AD) users who are assigned to a security group that is nested under more than one group in AD, and then assigned to a role in Blue Prism. Previously, when the AD user was added to Blue Prism, the user was only granted the permissions of the first parent group to be processed; all other parent groups were ignored. This issue has been fixed and all permissions from all groups are now correctly assigned. A similar issue occurred when moving a user from a parent group to a nested group, where the nested group permissions were not correctly synchronized, leaving the previous permissions in place. This issue is also now fixed.

An error no longer occurs when users assign multiple AD security groups from multiple domains to a Blue Prism role in a single operation.

Previously, if an AD user existed in the Blue Prism database before an upgrade but had not yet logged in, administrators could re‑add that user after upgrading to the latest version. This issue has been addressed and the user is now cannot be selected in the Add User wizard, and cannot be re‑added.

An issue has been fixed where, if the SQL Server default schema is null, setting up the Active Directory (AD) cache for a new user resulted in an error. Now, when setting up the AD cache for a new user, if the default schema is null, the dbo schema is used.

When right-clicking an Active Directory (AD) group and creating a user, the new user is now created under the selected group. Previously, the user was created at the root level and had to be manually dragged to the appropriate group.

When a new Blue Prism role is created, the Manage role membership button is now disabled until the user clicks Apply for that role. Previously, an error displayed if users attempted to add an Active Directory security group to the role before clicking Apply, and this resulted in the group not being added to the role.

Changes have been made to the Windows highlighter to prevent it from launching duplicate processes. Previously, Blue Prism could incorrectly retain instances of the Windows highlighter process, which could lead to a long list of non-active highlighter sessions in Task Manager.

Changes include:

• Only launching highlighter processes at the start of a user spying operation in Application Modeller, or when a user requests that an element be highlighted.
• Ensuring that highlighter processes are correctly terminated when spying stops or is interrupted.
• Limiting the number of Windows highlighter processes to four (one per corner of the highlighted region).

An error no longer occurs in Application Modeller when launching Microsoft Edge in IE mode with the Enable java integration techniques option selected. Previously, when the application model was launched in this scenario, Blue Prism would pause for approximately 60 seconds, after which it would fail to attach to the browser window, and an error message would display.

The Citrix agent option on the Advanced install screen of the installation wizard has been renamed to Citrix Virtual Desktops agent to more accurately reflect the name of the application and differentiate it from the newly added Citrix Virtual Apps agent. After installation, the Citrix application name on the user's desktop has been updated from AppMan.Service to Citrix Virtual Desktops agent, and the icon has also been updated.

The latest Citrix integration ensures that if multiple browser instances are launched in a Citrix VDE, they are all successfully closed when using a Terminate action from a Navigate stage. Previously, if multiple browser instances were launched, only one would successfully close.

In the Advanced install screen of the installation wizard, if Citrix automation is selected and the user selects Citrix Virtual Desktops agent or Citrix Virtual Apps agent, the Citrix automation option is now automatically deselected.

The Citrix automation option has also been moved under Blue Prism to more accurately reflect the install structure.

An issue with Citrix integration, where named pipe server threads were not correctly deleted when the client was closed, which could cause 32-bit servers to fail after a large number of threads (over 1000), has been fixed.

An issue, introduced in Blue Prism 7.2.0, resulted in an error being displayed when trying to set or check the value of a startup parameter for a specific instance of a process scheduled to run as part of a scheduled task. Additionally, setting a startup parameter for any one of the scheduled sessions in a schedule applied that setting to all sessions added to the scheduled task. The error no longer displays and startup parameters can now be individually set for scheduled task sessions.

The Last Time Logged In filter in the Control Room > Resources panel, which is only available for users that have a Desktop license applied, now works as expected. Previously, this filter did not return any results.

An issue has been fixed with the Resource details screen, which is accessed from Control Room (only available if Save environment data for clients, runtime resources and servers to the database is enabled in System > System - Settings), where the values displayed for the Port and Application server were incorrect. All values are now accurately displayed.

When a schedule is deleted from Control > Schedules, a confirmation dialog now correctly displays without the Don't show this message again check box. Previously, the check box displayed on the confirmation dialog, but had no effect if clicked.

A performance issue has been resolved where interactions with UIA spied elements would run slower on the runtime resource in Control Room than they did in Design Studio when debugging the same action.

To improve the performance of loading the context menu for very large processes, the logic used when right-clicking a session in the Environment panel to determine whether the selected process has startup parameters has been changed.

A performance issue has been resolved where a timetable in a system with a very large number of schedules (more than 30,000) would take up to nine seconds to load.

Changes have been made to the insertion algorithm used in tree view lists to improve performance when adding items.

The way tree view list items are updated has also been made more efficient.

The rendering of Control Room information has been improved to provide a smoother transition when navigating between different screens.

An issue has been fixed where, after selecting the Run Now option for a schedule that did not have the Use time zone option selected, accessing the Today & Tomorrow timetable resulted in Control Room taking longer to load than in previous versions of Blue Prism. The performance of the Today & Tomorrow timetable is now consistent with previous versions of Blue Prism.

Previously, if using silent install to upgrade from a previous version of Blue Prism Enterprise with the Browser Automation Agent (BAA) also installed, users were required to manually uninstall BAA. Now, BAA is removed as part of a silent install of Enterprise version 7.3.

An issue has been fixed where users were unable to start the 32-bit version of the Blue Prism Server service on a 64-bit operating system. The 32-bit version of Blue Prism Server service can now be run on 64-bit operating systems.

An issue has been fixed with the inclusion of zero-width whitespace characters in upgrade scripts generated using AutomateC.exe that included the upgrade script for version 519. These characters caused Incorrect syntax errors when running the generated script, but the database would be incorrectly marked as upgraded. The upgrade script is now correctly generated and runs successfully.

Session logs are now successfully created regardless of the number of session IDs in the database tables. Previously, a System.OverflowException occurred when attempting to write additional session logs to the database once 2.1 billion logs had been created.

The URL for the Digital Exchange in the interactive client included search criteria that caused the search function in the Digital Exchange to fail, resulting in no search results being returned for any subsequent searches. The URL has been updated to remove these search criteria, and the search functionality now works as expected when the Digital Exchange is accessed from the interactive client.

In previous releases, the background color of the Store In field for the Tracking ID parameter in the Navigate stage was incorrectly showing as white. This could potentially cause issues with the visibility of field values if the text color was also white. The background color of the Store In field has now been changed to light blue.

Improvements have been made to drag and drop operations in Process and Object Studio when dragging multiple stages. Previously, scrolling started when the edge of the selected stages reached the edge of the screen, which could cause unexpected erratic movement of the canvas. Scrolling now only starts when the mouse reaches the edge of the screen, resulting in a smoother scrolling experience.

An error, introduced in Blue Prism 7.2, no longer occurs when handling binary data, for example, when attempting to fetch an object with a binary data type and store it in a data item.

Previously, any user could change the automatic backup time when editing a process or object, by selecting File > Back Up and then selecting a different time. This would change the backup time for all processes and objects, and for all users. This option can now only be changed by users with the permission to change the automatic backup interval in System > System > Settings.

Users can now configure SSL timeouts to avoid certificate checks timing out if there is known latency in the environment. SSL timeouts can be configured by setting the Resource.SSL.Cert.Timeout value (in milliseconds) in the following locations:

• For the Blue Prism Automate application, edit the setting in automate.exe.config.
• For the Blue Prism application server, edit the setting in BPServer.exe.config and BPServerService.exe.config.

It is recommended to configure these settings in combination, otherwise a shorter timeout than required may be used in some circumstances. If this value is not set, the TCP client default of 5000ms is applied.

An issue with the logic for calculating the New Year public holidays in the Japanese calendar has been fixed. Previously, the January 2, January 3, and December 31 holidays incorrectly moved to the next working day if they fell on a Sunday, or, in the case of January 2 and 3, if the New Year's Day holiday moved. These holidays are now correctly scheduled in the public holidays calendar for Japan.

If an organization does not observe the January 2, January 3, or December 31 holidays, the checkbox for those dates can be cleared so that they are not included in the calendar.

A new command has been created for the scheduler that both creates and starts the session, including any startup parameters. This ensures that if a session cannot be successfully started, it is not created and can be retried later.

Due to the expected decrease in the amount of pending sessions created by the scheduler as a result of this change, customers are encouraged to consider adopting this new mechanism following an upgrade by selecting the Create and start session in a single operation to prevent pending sessions option.

Browser extensions now support Insert/Invoke JavaScript functionality against frameset elements, which are used in HTML 4 applications.

A new setting on the configuration screen for the browser extension allows Blue Prism to retry sending messages to the native messaging host if they have not been delivered. The new setting is called Maximum retries to send message to a native messaging host and the default number of retries is five.

Previously, when attempting to launch a new browser with a file Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) as the address (for example, C:\BPHelp\bpdocs\home.htm), if an existing browser that had been launched with a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) as the address (for example, https://www.blueprism.com) was already open, an error message was displayed stating that the browser was already launched. This issue has now been fixed and the second browser now opens successfully with the URI as the starting address.

When using the 64-bit Blue Prism installer, the 64-bit native messaging host is now installed instead of the 32-bit version. Previously, the 32-bit native messaging host was incorrectly installed.

An issue has been fixed where the runtime resource became unresponsive when launching a Microsoft Edge browser in IE mode using the command line switch ‑‑new‑window if a process had previously launched and closed an instance of Microsoft Edge browser in IE mode.

An update has been applied to the authentication used for named pipes for browser extensions to improve security.

An issue has been fixed where, if the Microsoft Edge browser was launched with debugging enabled, logs were triggered before the logging context was set, and were sent to an unnamed text file. All logs are now sent to the correct native messaging host file.

An intermittent issue has been fixed where the Web Input Type in Application Modeller could not distinguish the defined element from other elements on the page. Application Modeller can now correctly identify elements using the Web Input Type.

An exception is now thrown if a specified value does not exist in a dropdown list when using Select List Item with a Chromium browser. Previously, the first value in the list was incorrectly selected if the specified value did not exist.

An issue has been fixed when using the Select List Item action in Navigate stages. List items that included non‑breaking spaces were not compared correctly with a provided string that included regular spaces. Such spaces are now correctly compared.

An issue has been fixed with Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome where launching a second browser instance failed if the launch arguments for the second browser contained additional arguments to those used for the first browser. For example, launching a second browser instance with the --new-window option caused Blue Prism to become unresponsive for approximately 30 seconds, and fail to launch the second browser instance. A second browser instance with additional launch arguments can now be launched as expected.

Previously, uninstalling the Google Chrome browser extension incorrectly removed all extensions from the browser. The uninstall process now only removes the Blue Prism browser extension; all other extensions are unaffected.

An issue has been fixed when automating web pages where, when clicking a button on a page that resulted in a confirm dialog displaying, no response would be received by Blue Prism from the browser extension, and the operation would time out.