Blue Prism UI Automation Failing after Chrome / Edge Update to 140

[Adrian__Dones]

Hi guys,

Hope all of you are well and have a great week start.

Starting from last week (around Wednesday~Thursday) Blue Prism fails while running to identify properly the fields spied using UI Automation mode.

While trying to check in Application Modeler if the fields can still be visible, they were successfully identified, but while running the whole process, somehow the process remains blocked while trying to access those fields.

The interesting part is that after re-spying the fields using UI-Automation (just to test if a new fresh set of fields would make the cut) the bot still fails.

Just to mention, the process worked properly without any errors more than 2 years and all of a sudden it failed to work anymore.

Please let me know if this is a general issue and/or how it can be fixed.

Much appreciated all your help 🙂

[Neel1]

Lucky You @GM11 . Our security policy do not allow us to roll back to earlier version. We have to dealt with this issue now.!

[GM11]

Suggest you try the above parameters as mentioned by Jordan which may be a quick fix for the time being.

[Michael_S]

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@jordan.harvey.norfolkcc wrote:

I have fixed this by adding the following CLI parameter to launch:

--disable-features=UiaProvider

Most importantly though, Chromium's built in UIA provider is still under development:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/refs/heads/main/docs/accessibility/browser/uiautomation.md

This was enabled by default last month:

https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/6818985

---

We've tried this with success internally also. To apply this, you need to add:

--disable-features=UiaProvider

To the launch parameters for edge.exe

[Adrian__Dones]

Hi Michael,

Can you provide a screenshot of how to apply this parameter?

Many thanks for all your help

[willem.d4s]

When we try to use " --disable-features=UiaProvider " and then spy something with UIA Mode, it seems to now find the "UIA Class Name" and the "Parent UIA Class Name" attributes.  Previously we were identifying elements with "UIA Name", "UIA Class Name" and the "Parent UIA Class Name" attributes.   I am not sure that this will work for us, we are still doing further testing.

[Michael_S · Accepted solution]

Hi all,

Just want to summarise the current workarounds we've found to be viable:

Ideal workaround: Roll back to a previous, stable browser version and implement version control.

Otherwise:

• For both Chrome and Edge, you should set --disable-features=UiaProvider in launch parameters for edge.exe or chrome.exe (thank you @jordan.harvey.norfolkcc for flagging this!)

[Update: As @willem.d4s points out, you may need to re-spy some elements after doing this.]

And then implement version control. 

Note that we suspect that the launch parameter workaround will only work until v147 of Chrome / Edge, so we highly recommend implementing version control for your browsers before then.

[Anne-Marie]

Hi Michael, how do we know it wont work after v147? looking the ms schedule we have a release date of  march / april 26. Do we know what the issues is? and will BP be working on a fix rather than this work around, thanks ?

[jordan.harvey.norfolkcc]

@Michael_S it would be ideal if Blue Prism could collect logs from customer installations etc, and provide feedback to the chromium team on this issue https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40808144

I will add my own feedback tonight / tomorrow.

@Adrian__Dones see below

[Michael_S]

@jordan.harvey.norfolkcc @Anne-Marie - our next step will be root cause analysis and collaboration with MS / Google, to get towards a more permanent solution. 

@Anne-Marie - that's based on Chromium allowing us to fall back to the old mode for UIA, which they have stated they will stop in 147.

[jordan.harvey.norfolkcc]

Only reference I can find to a potential removal is the enterprise policy, not the actual feature flag which is baked into the core of chromium https://issues.chromium.org/issues/331470137

Like others, we cannot enable version control for security reasons, so will have to monitor this and see how Blue Prism resolves. Either that or Chromium reverts the change and takes it back to testing.