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 🙂

[sy_lee]

No, I was referring to Elements like 'MenuItem' and 'ListItem.'

[Michael_S]

Hi everyone - our support team are continuing to investigate along with assistance from our dev team. As of the time of this post, there's no further update, but I'm in receipt of issue updates and will share them here as they happen. 

Huge thank you to everyone sharing their workarounds and stories, it's a big help to everyone involved. 

[Denis__Dennehy]

Oh dear.  As though to re-emphasise my comment about the need for change controls an Edge update has broken UIA!  I am becoming the old guy that says things 'I don't think you wanted to do that' (google old Harry Enfield sketches..)

Best practices would be to have a separate group policy for your robot VDI machines.  This gives better security for the robots giving only the neccessary permissions rather than mimicking humans,  it also allows you to have different automatic update settings to the rest of your company so you can have proper, periodic, change control around Microsoft updates, ensuring you have done some localised testing before roll out.
Also, if your robots are on a separate group with automatic updates disabled you will be able to roll back Edge by getting the previous version form the MS Edge for business download page.

If you do not control and regression test where you can, you are at a constant risk of emergencies.  There is only so much the RPA platform vendors can do in terms of testing pre-release versions of browsers - they cannot guarantee additional changes will be slipped in that might break everything.

[Michael_S · Accepted solution]

Hello everyone, a small update:

1. May we ask for anyone impacted to report this issue to the Chromium team here: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/new?component=1457002&template=0&pli=1. This may help to prioritise the issue with their development team. 
   
   
2. We are currently evaluating whether reverting to the old mode for UI Automation in Chrome is an effective workaround. This is carried out by setting the UiAutomationProviderEnabled policy to False as detailed here. This policy is unfortunately only available for Chrome. Should you try this, we would be keen to know the results.
   
   
3. We're continuing to explore options for Edge. 
   
   
4. The most effective workaround is still to roll back to a previous browser version if you're able to do so.

Thanks all,

M

[marcmichaelmoran]

I am also experiencing the same issue here, and I have found a little bit of success by using AA instead of UIA where possible (Web spying is obviously ideal, but not possible everywhere)

AA can be enabled by adding --force-renderer-accessibility to the Command Line Params when Launching Edge or Chrome, just after the url. For example: "http://www.google.com --force-renderer-accessibility=completed"

I have found that the issue is only affecting us when a Wait stage is ran which:

a) has only UIA elements to search for (or UIA is a higher priority than a WEB/AA/Win32 element)

b) the UIA element is present on screen (if it isn't the Wait will time-out as normal)

c) the linked stage from the Wait condition is a Navigate stage. We were able to progress through a Wait stage multiple times (both from Process Studio and Control Room) yesterday when the Wait condition linked to an end stage. 

The trick of clicking around manually on the Edge/Chrome window to stop BP from hanging has not worked for me. However, I have been able to get BP to stop hanging by removing the UIA element referenced in the affected Wait stage from the screen. It seems that there seems to be some hold up between BP detecting UIA elements and actually ending the Wait stage.

[katergrz]

If you use Edge, you can rollback Edge to 139, here is instruction

https://pureinfotech.com/rollback-previous-version-microsoft-edge/

[AmeraYana]

Could it be something related with browser extension? 
Sometimes deleting and re-install + fix values in Registry Editor may help.

[GM11]

Rolling back to ms edge v139 has resolved the issue for us.

[jordan.harvey.norfolkcc]

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

[Adrian__Dones]

Hi Jordan,

Can you please provide some screenshots of how you applied that parameter?

Many thanks for all your help