Blue Prism UI Automation Failing after Chrome / Edge Update to 140

[Adrian__Dones]

Hi guys,

Hope all of you are well and have a great week start.

Starting from last week (around Wednesday~Thursday) Blue Prism fails while running to identify properly the fields spied using UI Automation mode.

While trying to check in Application Modeler if the fields can still be visible, they were successfully identified, but while running the whole process, somehow the process remains blocked while trying to access those fields.

The interesting part is that after re-spying the fields using UI-Automation (just to test if a new fresh set of fields would make the cut) the bot still fails.

Just to mention, the process worked properly without any errors more than 2 years and all of a sudden it failed to work anymore.

Please let me know if this is a general issue and/or how it can be fixed.

Much appreciated all your help 🙂

[IACRA]

Hi Adrian, we're having the same issues. A lot of our UIA elements are failing to identify while running, but are identifiable through the app modeller.

Best guess I've got at the minute is that there was an Edge update late last week. It seems the issue is prevalent across our company BP community, so definitely not an isolated case.

[Adrian__Dones]

Hi Iacra,

Many thanks for the fast response.

I'm using Chrome in the automations. I believe last week was an update also on it.

Do you have any idea if any workaround has been put in place?

Many thanks 🙂

[IACRA]

Nothing that I'm aware of sorry, I too was hoping to find some guidance here.

[Adrian__Dones · Accepted solution]

Hi Iacra,

Found this:

https://support.blueprism.com/en/support/solutions/articles/7000095180-why-do-i-have-browser-automation-issues-after-updating-to-chrome-version-140-

[Denis__Dennehy]

My first thought is what has changed, because if nothing has changed your automation would still work.  One of the most important things to get right when scaling an automation capability is managing change well (pre-change regression testing, monitoring while change is happening, having roll back plans if a change breaks stuff).  In this case has Blue Prism changed, has the OS changed, has the application changed, has the environment speed changed?  When you know what has changed getting to the root of why something has stopped working is far easier.

What controls are currently in place for OS updates or application changes (admittedly the later is problematic for SaaS apps on uncontrolled rolling updates).  If it is the automation speed that has changed, then wait logic needs looking at. 

You say that you had to respy everything to get your automation working again.  Have you compared the previous element values to the new values.  It might be that you need to make your element values more dynamic or deselect some to make your automation more robust to whatever has changed.

[EricLi]

we have blue prism upgraded from 6.10.4 to 7.4.1 a month ago. It is running well always, but today in certain application, most of the UIA elements do not work. As long as the first time operate on UIA element, it will be frozen to go forward.  If I login the runtime resource and move mouse or type on  keyboards, it will go on as usual. I reproduced on UAT, there is error message return as bellow: 

Internal : Failed to perform step 1 in Navigate Stage 'SearchCriteria_UIA' on page 'SearchNo' - Exception during remote setforegroundwindow - System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception (0x80004005): Access is denied
at System.Diagnostics.ProcessManager.OpenProcess(Int32 processId, Int32 access, Boolean throwIfExited)
at System.Diagnostics.Process.GetProcessHandle(Int32 access, Boolean throwIfExited)
at System.Diagnostics.Process.OpenProcessHandle(Int32 access)
at System.Diagnostics.Process.get_Handle()
at BluePrism.ApplicationManager.Operations.WindowOperationsProvider.ForceForeground(IntPtr windowHandle)

[RoopkiranBevara]

Hi @EricLi , 

we're facing the same issues. A lot of our UIA elements are failing to identify while running, but are identifiable through the app modeler.

Best guess there was an Edge update late last week. It seems the issue is with updating of browser. Lets wait for the solution from community.

[bclayton1896]

Alright, not going to blast 7.4.1, but we too have found issues after converting from 7.1.1 to 7.4.1.

We found specifically that there is a small visual difference between a newly created object's App Model, and an App Model for an object imported in from 7.1.1.

This observation was driven by a specific issue that arose when launchng an MS Edge app returning an error that "the process has detected another instance of Blue Prism that owns this session" and issues with the 7.4.1 browser extension not being detected - although the message broker host was running and available.

Recreating the object from scratch in 7.4.1 alleviated the issues above for us; this leaves us in a quandry as now we have a plethora of objects to recreate, across multiple applications.

One such issue we've run into is SAP. After the 7.4.1 upgrade, we noticed that some parameters for SAP screen elements no longer existed in our actions. We have not attempted to recreate the SAP objects yet, but we did some workarounds. These SAP objects were also imported from 7.1.1.

I don't know if this is good news, or bad news, but it is what we've discovered.

[david.l.morris]

Just dropping these links here too. Known issue as of a few days ago. We are also having this issue in Edge Version 140.0.3485.54 in Blue Prism 6.10.1.

Why do I have Browser Automation issues after updating to Chrome or Edge browsers version 140? :

[BPE] BPNGRPA-10051 - Wait stages executed against Chrome and Edge 140 can cause Blue Prism Enterprise to pause/freeze and not proceed to subsequent stages :