You may encounter the following error message when a Blue Prism Process or Business Object is trying to read from or write to a popup window:
"The object invoked has disconnected from its clients. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80010108 (RPC_E_DISCONNECTED)."
This error is frequently reported when using Internet Explorer version 11.
There are two possible reasons for this issue:
- Blue Prism is attempting to interact with a browser window that it has previously connected to in the current session, but which is no longer running. This is usually caused by a window or tab in the browser, which was running in a separate Internet Explorer (iexplore.exe) process, no longer running (i.e. it was closed or has become unresponsive).
- The web page being spied is based upon IFRAME elements, and the behaviour of these elements was changed in Internet Explorer 11 requiring a product fix to avoid this issue.
How to resolve this issue
There are three possible solutions:
Solution 1 - Upgrade to Version 6.4.0 or higher
Although a fix was initially introduced to the IFRAME issue in v5.0.18, this was only a partial solution. A more complete and robust fix has since been implemented in release v6.4.0 (for BG-2214) so that the element information within Internet Explorer 11 can now be extracted successfully.
Therefore, if you are using Internet Explorer 11 then it is recommended that you first upgrade the Blue Prism software in order to prevent this error from appearing.
Solution 2 - start using the Child Index value of an Internet Explorer Process
Ensure that the Blue Prism Object you are designing is connected to the correct 'iexplore.exe' process by setting the Child Index property to refer to the correct instance of the running process. As Internet Explorer designates the child index as an ordinal number based on the order in which the process was opened, setting the correct child index value depends on being able to control the order in which Internet Explorer windows are opened. If this is known and controllable, then Child Index is the preferred solution.
Solution 3 - Resolution Keeping all tabs with a single Process
The TabProcGrowth setting will control the behaviour of IE related to tabs and multiple processes. Whilst this may seem a simple solution to the problem, it does run the risk of a single tab window becoming unstable, which might affect all other open tabs that are being controlled by the main 'iexplore' process.
Essentially:
"By default, IE8 will start with two instances of iexplore.exe (one for the Frame, one for the tab) and grows the number of tab processes as needed based on the amount of available RAM, the number of tabs, the integrity levels for tabs, and the number of distinct IE sessions."
Therefore, to run all tabs in one process that you can identify and attach to, you can set the TabProcGrowth setting to be a DWORD value of '0' in the associated Registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN
The TabProcGrowth key may already have a value, and it may be defined as a string, but this can be changed from a 'REG_SZ' type of key to a 'DWORD' type, and the value changed from a string to a number, by deleting and recreating the key. By changing the type to a number this is setting the maximum number of tab processes that can be executed for a single session of a single frame process.
