Morning all
In the interest of sharing what you know when it helps, in early December some of our automations stopped working (terminated) as a previous step had worked (i.e. raised no exceptions or errors) but had not actually happened; this resulted in Excel failing to attach as it was not even open. A legitimate reason for terminating as something weird has definitely happened!
We are using BPC version 7.1.2 and these automations have been working fine for at least that last 12 months (in some cases 2 years). We click on a link after downloading a file, as per this example:
Using something similar to this automation:
As you can see, if the Link does not exist, we Time Out. If if we can't interact it with we have a retry loop but then ultimately raise an Exception. In all of the terminations, this page has completed (on the 1st cycle) and not raised any errors. The process therefore assumes that Excel is open and thigs can continue.
We were also experiencing slow network performance at the time, and I put this down to the download somehow being lost in the ether. However, after restarting the automations and watching what was going on, I could see the words "open file" being selected (some very light blue dots appear around it) but the action not being completed. I therefore added a Global Send Keys "{ENTER}" 1 second after the global mouse click centre.
This may have made a bit of a difference (I thought it did) but it did not fully resolve the issue and there were still no errors being raised by the page.
With another automation, UI & GMCC were used to select a file type from a drop down menu and this also stopped working, but did not raise any errors.
From these two examples, it appears to me that UI and global mouse click centre on Edge are no longer robust or reliable, at least on my platform.
I recently applied 2 fixes which appear to have, finally, resolved the issue across the automations. In the first example above, we now use AA with Global Mouse Click Centre. In the drop down menu item selection example, we have added in options for SA & Browser and moved from GMCC to either Press or Click.
Thanks for sticking with the long read, but if some of your automations are terminating due to the previous stage "working" but not actually "working" then maybe this can help you out.
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Ian Meldrum
Senior RPA Developer
Royal Surrey NHS FT
UK
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