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Blue Prism 6.9 Issues

david.l.morris
Level 15
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
32 REPLIES 32

AllenChildress
Level 2

An excellent and detailed write up Dave.  I'm looking forward to other's answers. 

Sorry that I haven't yet tried these things, but will do as I get time to experiement.



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Allen Childress
Technical Architect
Accenture
America/Chicago
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david.l.morris
Level 15
For #1, a tiny bit more info. It appears to be an issue with more than just the Path and it may be a thing on websites with a lot of elements. I'm still looking into it.

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Dave Morris
Cano Ai
Atlanta, GA
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Dave Morris, 3Ci at Southern Company

david.l.morris
Level 15
Ok I finally have a way that I think anyone can reproduce this issue where BP is slow to find elements even when using the Path.

It appears to have to do with pages that have a lot of elements on them and/or maybe if they have elements that are very deep in the DOM/HTML/Web/X Path.

Here's how you can reproduce the issue:
  1. Create an object
  2. Go through the Application Modeller Wizard and select the option for Chrome/Firefox/Edge as well as to launch from an executable and put in https://google.com as the starting URL.
  3. Then click Launch in App Modeller so that Chrome opens and goes to google.com
  4. Manually search in this browser window in the google search bar for something like "Blue Prism", and if you have default settings, it should return 10 results on that page. If it returns you more, then change the Search Settings to limit to 10 and redo this step.
  5. Go back to App Modeller and create an element and/or use the existing one to spy any element near the top of the page such as the Search Input.
  6. In that element, deselect all attributes except XPath.
  7. Click Highlight. Blue Prism should highlight the element immediately with no delay.
  8. Now go back to the webpage and underneath the Search Bar near the top inside the webpage, click Settings > Search settings > and change the Results per page to 100. Then scroll down, click Save, and then click OK if Chrome pops up a confirmation box.
  9. Now, manually search again for the same search term such as "Blue Prism". It should return 100 results.
  10. Go back to App Modeller and you should be able to use the same element you used before since the element should still be there even though the page has more results. Click highlight for that element again. It should still find it this time, but it will take several seconds to do so.
If you're unfamiliar with this, note that the Path attribute is a direct address to the location of an element. And at least in past versions of Blue Prism, the entire page is not traversed in order to arrive at the particular element. It didn't matter how complex a page was or how many results there were or whatever, it was always lightning fast to highlight or find an element using the Path attribute.

I'm hoping that the devs can take this information and implement a hotfix because this issue has no workaround that I can find, and it essentially makes some automations take 10x longer to run, depending on the structure of the webpages being used and whether they are subject to this slowness.

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Dave Morris
Cano Ai
Atlanta, GA
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Dave Morris, 3Ci at Southern Company

Hi Dave,

I agree with you too. They have added bunch features but it's not at all stable and it make process slow.
For browser automation I raised lot of Support tickets before but I am glad they have added most the features in 6.9. But still few things are missing as you mentioned few ,also Navigate option is not there which is there in IE.

I have raised those in Idea panel but no response. Blue prism is doing good but they need to improve on few parts because other tools are so competitive in market.
Hope they will fix or at least notice our comments.

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Amlan Sahoo
RPA Consultant
Equinix
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Regards,
Amlan Sahoo

Hi Amlan,

I actually was hoping for the Navigate URL action as well, which was strange to be missing in Chrome/FF automation for so long. I'm not sure when it was added, but the other day I came across the action 'Set Address' in BP 6.9 Chrome automation. I've dropped a screenshot below showing this. I tested it a few times, and it does seem to work just as Navigate URL did before in IE automation. It seems to be slightly buggy, but it worked in most of my tests. Seems like BP should have brought this action up more prominently when they added it since so many people were still spying the address bar and sending keys into it for navigation. Oh well, I guess it's here now. 😃

22320.png


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Dave Morris
Cano Ai
Atlanta, GA
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Dave Morris, 3Ci at Southern Company

Thanks Dave,
But what I think Blue prism should work on all these perspective to give all the information to the users.

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Amlan Sahoo
RPA Consultant
Equinix
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Regards,
Amlan Sahoo

bruce.liu
Staff
Staff
Hi Dave,

Thanks so much for providing detailed feedback on v6.9 release around the browser mode functionality. We did introduce a lot of changes to improve the way how Chrome/Edge/Firefox works in v6.9. Some of those changes quite significant, which may have adverse impact on performance over the old releases. To get down to the bottom of this, your post has been passed onto the product team for comments. Rest assured, we will be looking into all your pointers and respond to them accordingly.

As always, we appreciate your honest feedback and continuous support.

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Bruce Liu
Senior Product Consultant, Professional Services
Blue Prism
Australia/Sydney
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Hi Dave,

Frankly I did not notice this action either in my comparison between Chrome/Edge/Firefox and IE mode. After looking into this closely, the backend ID of those actions are actually quite similar, the one for IE is called HTMLNavigate while the one for Chrome/Edge/Firefox is called WebNavigate. 

I will raise a bug on this hoping the display name can be made consistent as to the IE mode.

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Bruce Liu
Senior Product Consultant, Professional Services
Blue Prism
Australia/Sydney
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Hi Dave,

To echo my colleague Bruce's comment I'd like to thank you for your post.

I've reviewed the points you've raised in your original and subsequent posts and we've started a few investigations internally to provide an answer to some of the unexpected behaviours seen in your use of Blue Prism 6.9. I would expect a couple of new items to appear on the "Known Issues" article for Blue Prism 6.9 in the Support Centre under the status of "Under investigation" while we look into the points that you've raised.

When I have more information I will add a new reply to the thread to confirm what we've found.

Regards,
Rob

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Robert Nicklin
Product Owner
Blue Prism
Europe/London
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Robert Nicklin Product Manager Blue Prism Warrington, England