Navigate stage click action used to work but does not work anymore

[ArantaChatterje]

Hi Everyone,

I created a process which uses 4-5 BOs. One of the BOs has a navigate stage which simply clicks a button (a web element/button on a website which is open in Chrome). The navigate stage used to click the button just fine. Yesterday, for some odd reason the process started to fail because the Navigate stage executes (does not throw a runtime exception) but does not click the button anymore so the rest of the process flow fails due to this. When I looked into the BO action which has this Navigate stage, the Application Modeler highlights the spied element and can find it. The Navigate stage just does not click this button anymore.

Has anyone encountered this issue before? How can this be fixed (I will use Global Send Keys to send  tab key presses to the website to find the button and click it as of now) and how can we ensure that web elements that could be clicked earlier when the solution was designed, can always reliably be clicked in future as well after the process runs in the production environment?

TIA!

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Aranta Chatterjee
Digital Solutions Specialist
Techstra Solutions LLC
America/New_York
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[_Amlansahoo]

Hi Aranta,

You can make the element type as WEB ELEMENT. Thn if you drag that element to navigate stage you will get an option for focus and then use send keys for ENTER. It will work like that. Otherwise use UIA mode to spy that element. This is always problem with Blue Prism.

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Amlan Sahoo
RPA Consultant
Equinix
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[ArantaChatterje]

Hi Amlan,

Thank you for the quick response. I tried your suggestion but the button is still not getting clicked. My guess is that the website has changed its underlying HTML code and so Blue Prism is not able to click the button although it finds the button as a web element using Application Modeller.

Let me know if there are any other ideas for what else I can try.

Thank you!

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Aranta Chatterjee
Digital Solutions Specialist
Techstra Solutions LLC
America/New_York
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[ArantaChatterje]

The following worked to solve the click problem: checking "Use fixed browser extension port (31924) only" under System in Blue Prism and rebooting system. Then changing spy mode to UIA for the button from Browser Mode for Chrome.

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Aranta Chatterjee
Digital Solutions Specialist
Techstra Solutions LLC
America/New_York
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[MarcinDabrowski]

Hello Aranta,

Thanks for raising this issue.

I encountered the same problem, and indeed UIA mode fixed it for me, but I was trying to find a solution to the usual web element clicking using 'navigate' not working.
What I managed to find out by a lot of trial and error (at least in my web automation case via Chrome), is that although the website navigation worked as such (selecting drop downs, clicking 'tabs' to open other section of the page etc), the clicking into text fields did not.
BPC process seems to have partially 'lost' the context of the web app.
I fixed it by mapping the web app render context window in Win32 mode, then using 'navigate' to click in the centre of the window, which seems to have refocused BPC. (Using 'activate' action in 'navigate' did not seem to work to achieve this effect. The Chrome window was activating, but 'navigate' was still not working.)

After that, the 'navigate' started working as expected with the text fields, and i was able to click into the desired field, and use 'send keys' to populate it.  

It's a 'dirty workaround', but I wanted to have a backup automation so my primary text entry is using UIA, with the Web automation being the backup.

Hope this helps!

(PS - The 'browser extension port (31924)' issue is  a bit annoying, when you have to restart the machine/VM to test Chrome automation in 'production' (control room) or 'development' mode.)

Best Wishes,
Marcin

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Marcin Dabrowski
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