Hi Everyone,
Blue Prism 6.9 had a lot of fixes and enhancements that I was excited about. However, after testing some of these, it's a bit underwhelming and I'd like to see if anyone else has the same concerns as well as if there are workarounds for some of these issues.
1. Browser automation is much slower now when using the Path attribute. Yes, I know the concerns about using the Path attribute, but I sometimes use Get Path and dynamically manipulate the Path attribute to iterate over a webpage when otherwise Blue Prism is too slow to interact with it. I've had a handful of other qualified developers confirm on the same websites that this is the only viable solution. My question is why is it slow suddenly and is there some other combination of attributes that should make it faster? (Match Index does not improve the speed in this case)
2. Blue Prism browser automation in 6.9 is still slow. Blue Prism does a lot of things well, but finding attributes quickly in a web page is not one of them. Other automation tools do not have this issue. I've tested this myself. One of the reasons it is slow is that Navigate, Read, and Write stages do not have implicit wait times to allow for elements to appear, so we have to use Conditional Wait stages to wait for an element to appear. But what do you do when it takes Blue Prism 10, 20, 30 seconds to find an element? If you use a Wait stage and then a Read stage, you're waiting double the time when a Read stage, for example, could have a condition inside of it to wait for an element to appear and thus be more efficient. Anyway, this isn't an issue in particular with 6.9, but I feel like it deserves a mention in case I've been using Blue Prism wrong these past few years. Also, we need Match Reverse in Chrome/Firefox/Edge.
3. The Hover action was one of the biggest reasons I was excited about BP 6.9, but upon testing it I found that it is not actually Hovering the mouse cursor. Instead, it is activating the element's Hover trigger, which is not the same thing at all. This addition is certainly a good thing, and I've confirmed it does work in some cases. I have yet to implement it in a full-speed, back-office automation and haven't tried it in a ton of situations yet. But is there really still not a way to simply move the cursor to a particular element without clicking on it? Again, this is a thing in other automation tools, and Blue Prism needs it too.
4. The new feature involving the Tracking ID sounds cool, but in practice it doesn't appear to be thought out fully. There are two issues I've already come across and I expect that there are more. First, the Attach action of a Navigate stage does not output the Tracking ID, which means we can only use this feature if we newly launch the browser session. Maybe this is required based on how it works, such as Blue Prism may need to set something in the session when creating. I've no idea, but without the ability to Attach to a browser and then identify it by the Tracking ID, I am hesitant to use the feature at all. Second, the Tracking ID feature has broken Detach stages. Some automations I've seen do have detach/attach in them, and this is broken immediately in 6.9. I've tested this in two separate environments. If you don't use a Tracking ID, Detach just doesn't work at all which is a code breaking change in Blue Prism that obviously has a workaround but it involves no longer using the detach stage at all as well as having to edit who knows how many objects.
5. This is a small thing but noteworthy, in my opinion. The Release Notes of 6.9 say that Document Loaded was added to Wait stages, but actually Parent Document Loaded was added instead. Document Loaded is not available in 6.9. Those are two different things available in IE automation, and personally I'd like to see Document Loaded added to Chrome/Firefox/Edge automation as well.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to respond and tell me I'm wrong. My goal is to be told "No, Dave, you're dumb. Here's the right way to do that" and then I can cry in my pillow but be excited that the feature actually does work as intended or w/e. =)
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Dave Morris
Cano Ai
Atlanta, GA
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Dave Morris, 3Ci at Southern Company
