Issues With Chrome Objects Finding Elements

[TracyGreen]

Hello,
We are on Blue Prism 6.9.  We are having issues with our conversion to Chrome for our web apps.  We spy elements in browser mode, test the process and everything works fine.  But once in place, we find that sometimes the object doesn't find the element on the screen.  We can watch and see that element is there, but it can't be found.  If we're debugging, it won't highlight.  We re-spy it and it will work for that instance, but a few hours or days later it gets the same issue.

My co-workers have found forum discussions about this type of thing being more prevalent with 6.9 that advise that 7.0 is more stable.  An upgrade isn't something that can be done quickly. 

Does anyone has any techniques to work around this issue while staying on 6.9?

Those of you who have had this issue, have you tried switching to Edge?  Does that buy us anything?

Those of you who have upgraded to 7.0 -- what percentage of improvement have you seen?

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Tracy Green
Systems Developer III
Federated Insurance
America/Chicago
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[SaajKapoor]

Hello @Tracy Green,

I' would recommend re-spying the element as a separate item in the application modeller and then comparing the attributes.
Since you're using a web application, it's likely the path, class name or ID may have changed.

Thanks

Saaj

​

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Saaj Kapoor
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[John__Carter]

Hi Tracy - just to add to Saaj's advice, it sounds like the element 'definition' that was captured during dev does not fit the state of the application at runtime. One or more of the attribute values may have changed, and one way to try and see this is by creating a temporary 'twin' element and then comparing it to the original. And as Saaj says, things like Path and Class Name are usually the one to look at first.

If this does turn out to be the issue then you've two choices. Either exclude the offending attribute from the element definition, or change the Match Type to something other than 'Equals' in order to introduce the flexibility capable of working around the variation.

A basic example of this is where the window title of an app is 'Customer System - Mrs J Smith' when you spy it, but you know that you'll be looking at other customer records at run time. So rather than use 'Equals' you choose 'Wildcard' and change the attribute value 'Customer System - *'

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John Carter
Professional Services
Blue Prism
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[RamónRequena_L1]

I am pretty certain it has to do with the way Blue Prism attaches to chrome pre 6.10 (port issue) rather than the element attributes being dynamic or wrongly spied. She is saying that this worked before in IE, and since the migration to Chrome, it stopped working.

Tracy, the only workaround I have found so far (which is not 100% reliable but, in our case, does the trick), is to include recovery logic to shut down/kill chrome in case of the element not being found > try launching chrome again and see if the element is found,

Something like this:



If this still fails, the only solution is to reboot the Resource.

Good luck!

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Ramón Requena López
RPA Developer
Magenta Telekom
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[esaugos]

Hi @Tracy Green,

Please check the system settings in your Blue Prism and see if the fixed port settings are checked or unchecked.
If there is check means the fixed port is enabled and if its unchecked then it means that the ephemeral port is activated.
I think from BP V6.8 tracking ID was introduced which identifies which the Chrome or Edge browser instances and attach to the target application accordingly.
Tracking ID can be found as an output in the launch Navigate stage which will display kind of GUID value​.
You can try passing the Tracking ID in navigate stages to see if that Browser mode is working for you or not.

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Saurabh Goswami
RPA Architect
Ericsson
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[TracyGreen]

Thank you for all the responses.  We found something that seems to resolve  95% of cases.  We are now spying the window in win32 mode.  When we encounter the problem, we're doing something similar to what Ramon is suggesting, but we are calling a close on the element rather than a terminate for the root Chrome.  We put this in late yesterday and our numbers this morning were much better.

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Tracy Green
Systems Developer III
Federated Insurance
America/Chicago
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[esaugos]

Hi @Tracy Green,

If you are going for Win32 mode to close the window then make sure to capture Window Text attribute and use a dynamic wait to check the window and then close the window using close navigate stage.

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Saurabh Goswami
RPA Architect
Ericsson
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[RohitSrivastav1]

Hi Tracy

Please share the error message.

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Rohit Srivastava
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