HTML Navigate stages seem to cause disconnect

[AmiBarrett]

We have a web application that requires a user login. Previously when we had Blue Prism launch to this page using a Navigation - Launch stage, the subsequent actions would say it was no longer connected to the process. We got around this by launching IE via command-line and attaching afterward. Now that we've gotten past that, we're trying to avoid AA navigation by simply using a Navigate stage to change the URL once logged in. This seems to also throw "Not Connected" error messages. On the process level, the flow has it perform a login action, return to the process, then call a processing action from the same object. On the off-chance there may have been a caching issue, I added in a step to check if there was a valid connection and reattach if there wasn't. Despite going through this without error, it still returns "Not Connected" when feeding it a URL. Save for doing a global mouse click on either page elements or the URL bar, is there any known way around this?   Edit: This is on 5.0.24.

[John__Carter]

Sounds like an odd one. After navigating, could you just re-attach, or is it not that straight forward? One thing to consider when going direct to a URL is whether it's actually OK to do so. On some web apps the button or link that takes you to the next page may have additional code that runs when you click, code that doesn't get run when you navigate directly. Often this is not the case, but I've seen it where taking shortcuts screws up the behaviour of the web app.

[AmiBarrett]

Yeah, that occurred to me as well and launched the dive into a bit of a rabbit hole. The short of it is that if it disconnects, a reattach will fail and claim there's no instance of the object (even though IE exists). I wound up using Win32 to click the URL bar, then paste the new URL and send an {ENTER} keystroke. Turns out in IE, on a secured website, the lock and the 'Go' arrow show up as the same window element, which prevents a Global Mouse Click Center from functioning properly. The web app is happy enough with a new URL - it just reuses the cached session/cookies. There was a similar issue I ran into on this process which made little to no sense (I've inherited it to apply fixes). The process will start out by running an attach/login action. Said action reaches an end stage and returns to the process. The following step in the process is another action in the same object to work on the form. Even though nothing should have deconstructed that object instance, something about that also made it lose connection in the same fashion. A re-attach works about 50% of the time. On failure, terminating and restarting IE, then logging in and continuing without returning to the process layer seems to keep it happy. In the latter issue, it seemed like it was just a weird caching issue until I was able to prove that the object hadn't been fully deconstructed though, as it still kept variables passed to it in an earlier section of the process. As for the former, it seems like certain navigate actions also cause issues. Shortly after posting this, I began to paw through the changelogs for subsequent versions of 5x. It looks like a couple of builds later, they addressed ""an unexpected error when navigating to a URL within a process"", but due to the vagueness of this it isn't clear if that actually fixes both of these issues. A proposal has been sent out internally to upgrade so we can find out, but it may be a long while before it sees the light of day, haha.