Environment Variable Password Data Item Issue After Upgrading to Blue Prism 7.3.1

[sjimoh]

Upon upgrading from Version 6.9 to 7.3.1, I noticed that all credentials/password Data Item stored in the environment variables section were updated. After investigation, it appears that all passwords are now replaced with long sets of alphanumeric characters instead of the previously encrypted values. These passwords have been in use since as far back as 2020, and I am unable to retrieve them. Consequently, any processes involving these passwords are currently generating errors. I need assistance in resolving this issue.

Thanks.

[david.l.morris]

That is definitely something to submit a ticket for so that Blue Prism Support can directly help you with it. Even if it is a known issue, it would be good to submit a ticket so Blue Prism can track which issues happen to which customers and how many etc.

You're mentioning this for environment variables, and that isn't exactly the same thing I came across, but it may be the same root issue.

Okay, actually, there is a known issue that sounds like exactly what you are experiencing. Here is a link to the known issues in 7.3: https://support.blueprism.com/en/support/solutions/articles/7000084569-known-issues-in-blue-prism-version-7-3-releases 

And here is a link directly to the known issue you are describing: https://support.blueprism.com/en/support/solutions/articles/7000089578 

In case for some reason you don't have access that (and for others who read this), I'll paste just the pertinent part of this here:

"If a data item, collection, or environment variable using a password data type is imported into Blue Prism 7.3, or is present in an environment when upgraded to 7.3 or higher, data stored in the password data type field may be overridden if the saved value is either null or contains a colon (:) character. If this occurs, the value becomes encrypted and unusable."

Is there a chance you had a colon in the value? It is possible that this issue description doesn't fully describe all the scenarios where this can happen though. I had this happen with collections created in v6, and in my case it was that they were empty/null and the value came out like "adsfasdfasdfasdfsdlkhfjklisdjhf" where it should have been just an empty value.

The workaround unfortunately for you probably will need to be install Blue Prism 6 as a local standalone version and get an old version of your database to connect to / restore to, and then you can get the values out of those environment variables. If it is possible to do this from v7, I'm just not aware of it. Not saying it isn't possible; I just think it may not be. Edit: It just occurred to me after posting this that you may have a further issue to figure out. If you don't have the original encryption key, then you may not be able to recover those values at all. If the encryption key was saved in your original database then a local standalone environment may be all you need. If it was stored on the app server (which is standard), then you may need to go find that key and put it into the encryption scheme in this temporary standalone environment so that it can decrypt the values for you in a process or whatever.