BluePrismReleaseNotes5.0.33

Release Notes and Upgrade Guide RELEASE NOTES Version: 5.0.33

For more information please contact: [email protected] | UK: +44 (0) 870 879 3000 | US: +1 888 757 7476 www.blueprism.com

Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................................................3 Support and assistance .............................................................................................................................................3 Update notices - Read this first .....................................................................................................................................4 Upgrading from versions prior to 3.5.25 ...................................................................................................................4 Upgrading from versions prior to 4.2.16 ...................................................................................................................4 Upgrading from versions prior to 4.2.35 ...................................................................................................................4 Upgrading from versions prior to 5.0.5 .....................................................................................................................4 Upgrading from versions prior to 5.0.23 ...................................................................................................................5 Upgrading from versions prior to 5.0.24 ...................................................................................................................5 Upgrading from versions prior to 5.0.29 ...................................................................................................................5 Invalid upgrade paths................................................................................................................................................6 Applying the update ......................................................................................................................................................7 Database upgrade .....................................................................................................................................................8 Release notes ................................................................................................................................................................9 Version 5.0.33 – August 2017 ...................................................................................................................................9 Version 5.0.32 – July 2017 ......................................................................................................................................10 Version 5.0.30 – April 2017 .....................................................................................................................................17 Version 5.0.29 – April 2017 .....................................................................................................................................18 Version 5.0.24 – February 2017 ..............................................................................................................................22 Version 5.0.23 – October 2016 ...............................................................................................................................29 Version 5.0.21 – September 2016...........................................................................................................................33 Version 5.0.18 – July 2016 ......................................................................................................................................34 Version 5.0.12 – April 2016 .....................................................................................................................................37 Version 5.0.11 – March 2016 ..................................................................................................................................39 Version 5.0.10 – March 2016 ..................................................................................................................................41 Version 5.0.5 – January 2016: Early Adopter release ..............................................................................................45

The information contained in this document is the proprietary and confidential information of Blue Prism Limited and should not be disclosed to a third party without the written consent of an authorised Blue Prism representative. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying without the written permission of Blue Prism Limited. © Blue Prism Limited, 2001 – 2016 ®Blue Prism is a registered trademark of Blue Prism Limited All trademarks are hereby acknowledged and are used to the benefit of their respective owners. Blue Prism is not responsible for the content of external websites referenced by this document. Blue Prism Limited, Centrix House, Crow Lane East, Newton-le-Willows, WA12 9UY, United Kingdom Registered in England: Reg. No. 4260035. Tel: +44 870 879 3000. Web: www.blueprism.com

Commercial in Confidence

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Introduction The Blue Prism update process is designed to be both flexible and simple and as such it is possible to upgrade directly from one version of Blue Prism to a newer version without needing to step-through each intermediate update. E.g. a system can be updated directly from v4.2.5 to the latest version. The process of applying updates to Blue Prism should include the following steps prior to updating production environments: 1. Review the associated Release Notes, available via the User Portal. The notes contain a summary of the fixes and product enhancements included in a given release. 2. Using the Release Notes, verify if there are any special notices relating to the upgrade path being followed (e.g. if there are known actions that are required as part of the upgrade being applied; if a new license key is required; if an update to Login Agent is required; or any known implications). 3. Take a backup of the Blue Prism Database(s). 4. Apply the update to Dev and Test environments to validate the appropriate processing of designed processes (functional and non-functional verification is recommended). Non-functional testing could include reviewing the average handling time of core processes before and after the update has been applied. 5. Optionally, and where relevant, update existing processes to take account of new or improved features if these are desired and carry out appropriate testing. Where this includes importing the latest version of provided VBOs, all processes which reference these should be re-verified.

Support and assistance If assistance is required when following this guide, please contact Blue Prism Product Support ([email protected]).


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Update notices - Read this first The following notices must be reviewed when upgrading to, or beyond, any of the versions referenced below.

Upgrading from versions prior to 3.5.25 Manually disassociate certain security roles prior to upgrade If upgrading from an earlier version, there are a number of security roles that must be manually disassociated from any of the users from within the Users area (System Manager – Security) prior to carrying out the upgrade. The roles which much be disassociated are: Process Designer, Business Object Designer and Observer

The Blue Prism Server service must be manually deleted If a Blue Prism Server has been deployed as a Windows Service it is also necessary to delete the Blue Prism Server key from within the registry on that machine. •

Launch the registry editor, REGEDIT

•

Search for: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Eventlog

•

Locate the Blue Prism Server Key

•

Delete that key and all sub-keys

Upgrading from versions prior to 4.2.16 Previous License keys will not work This version introduces a new format of license key therefore a new key must be obtained prior to upgrading. These can be requested via your Blue Prism Account Manager.

Upgrading from versions prior to 4.2.35 Blue Prism Web services need to be re-exposed This version introduces a new method of exposing processes and objects as Web Services. Therefore if upgrading from an earlier version it is necessary for any Blue Prism Processes or Objects which should be available as a web service to be explicitly exposed using the new methods following the upgrade. Guidance is provided within the Blue Prism User Guide – Web Services.

Upgrading from versions prior to 5.0.5 Recommended steps: •

Prior to applying the update, generate a Roles report – this may be useful if there is a requirement to verify user permissions variation prior to and following the update. (System -> Reports -> Roles : Generate).

Required steps: •

Blue Prism v5.0 is built on .NET Framework 4, and therefore all components (Interactive Clients, Runtime Resources, and Application Server) will require .NET 4 to be installed as a pre-requisite.

•

A new license key will be required. This can be obtained via your Blue Prism Account Manager.

Control room permissions are automatically enforced for the command line Blue Prism v4.2.43 introduced an optional setting that would enforce control room permissions when interacting with Blue Prism processes via the command line. In v5.0 this option is enforced meaning that when interacting with processes programmatically via the command line the user requires the permission named Full access to session management.


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Dashboards require users to have increased SQL permissions Where the SQL account used for user access to the database has restricted access (i.e. where it is not a dbowner or similar), the security permissions for this account may need to be extended for the Management Dashboards to function correctly as these leverage stored procedures. Blue Prism provides a number of SQL Security roles which provide the execute privilege for the necessary stored procedures which can be allocated to these users if appropriate. These roles are: bpa_ExecuteSP_DataSource_bpSystem, bpa_ExecuteSP_DataSource_custom, bpa_ExecuteSP_System.

Increased SQL disk space is required and Unicode logging is disabled by default Blue Prism version 5.0 provides the capability to store information presented in any language by introducing support for storing Unicode characters within the database. Unicode characters require increased amounts of disk storage in comparison to ASCII. Users with a large number of work queue items in their database may wish to review their storage requirements prior to upgrading due to the increased storage space required. Unicode support is enabled automatically throughout the product with the exception of Session Logging (i.e. the logging which takes place as processes execute). If Unicode support is required for Session Logging this can be enabled manually within System settings.

Prior to enabling Unicode support for the Session Logs, the amount of available disk space should be considered in line with the current log retention and archiving strategy. Additionally features such as SQL Unicode Compression (if available) can be utilized to minimize the disk space required.

Previous License keys will not work This version introduces a new format of license key therefore a new key must be obtained prior to upgrading. These can be requested via your Blue Prism Account Manager.

Requires .NET Framework 4 Blue Prism v5.0 is built on .NET Framework 4, and therefore all components (Interactive Clients, Runtime Resources, and Application Server) will require .NET 4 to be installed as a pre-requisite.

Upgrading from versions prior to 5.0.23 Login Agent should also be upgraded While they continue to be supported, it is strongly recommended that previous versions of Login Agent are replaced with Login Agent 5.0.23 when using Blue Prism 5.0.23 to enable the features provided in Login Agent 5.0.23 to be realized.

Upgrading from versions prior to 5.0.24 Single sign-on settings need to be re-verified. When upgrading from a previous version that was configured to use Blue Prism Single Sign-on it is necessary to revalidate the single sign-on settings once this version has been installed.

Upgrading from versions prior to 5.0.29 Downgrading to earlier versions will require reconfiguration. Downgrading a device that has been installed with 5.0.29 (or above) to an earlier version will result in Blue Prism being unable to correctly read local configuration files. The re-configuration will require manual intervention.


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Invalid upgrade paths Occasionally features are made available both within the latest version of Blue Prism and also previous editions of the software. Where the changes have certain characteristics it is necessary to prevent certain upgrade paths to protect data integrity. The restriction is applied when applying the database update. The user carrying out the action will be advised that the database cannot be upgraded as it is newer than the required database. Applies to environments currently using

Notes

4.2.56+

The minimum Version 5 upgrade is 5.0.11 which is the first applicable version which contains the Encryption Schemes and AES-256 support provided in this version of 4.2.

4.2.57+

The minimum Version 5 upgrade is 5.0.12 which is the first applicable which contains the option to configure the inter-component communication to use FQDN host names.

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The minimum Version 5 upgrade is 5.0.18 which is the first applicable version which contains aligned work queue optimizations.


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Applying the update The recommended procedure for applying the update to a given environment is as follows: 1. Stop any currently executing processes or schedules. 2. Close or exit all connected Blue Prism clients (e.g. Interactive Clients, Runtime Resources, Blue Prism Server). 3. Back up the database (data files and transaction logs). 4. Install the new version by executing the supplied MSI installer on all devices. Commonly there is no requirement to remove a previous version first1. Subject to use of application distribution software, this task could be fully automated. 5. If there are database changes for the upgrade path (this is indicated in the Release Notes) these can either be applied via an in-product option, or through use of SQL Upgrade Script that is applied manually. The database changes will need to be applied to each environment affected by the update. (See following section for details). 6. Once the database changes have been applied (if required), on one client use the various connections to log into each of the Blue Prism environments to validate the install and that there are no further on-screen messages. 7. If Login Agent is used within the environment and it is necessary to apply an updated version (this is indicated in the Release Notes) it should be installed by executing the supplied MSI installer on all appropriate devices. Once Blue Prism has been installed the Login Agent installation files can be found within a Installers folder within the Blue Prism install location. 8. Following the update of Login Agent, install the updated Login Agent Blue Prism Release into the relevant environment and ensure that the relevant processes reference the updated Login Agent VBO. 9. Start the Blue Prism Server service on each Blue Prism Server and resume all Blue Prism clients. If further information or assistance is required please contact your Blue Prism Account Manager or Technical Support ([email protected]).

1

Review the Update Notices to verify if the upgrade path being followed does require the previous version to be uninstalled prior to a new version being applied.


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Database upgrade The database upgrade can be applied either via: •

An in-product option, or

•

Through use of SQL Upgrade Script that is applied manually.

In-product upgrade 1. On a single client (typically the Application Server), click File – Connections. 2. Ensure the relevant connection is selected and click Upgrade Database. The connection to the database will require necessary database permissions to carry out the required changes

Directly executed SQL Script (advanced) The SQL upgrade script for the relevant Blue Prism version must be applied against all databases which are to be upgraded. Once the database upgrade script has been executed against the relevant databases, the following command must be run against each of the affected Blue Prism environments from a single client (typically the Application Server). •

Single Sign On automatec.exe /refreshdependencies /dbconname “[DBConName]” /sso

•

Blue Prism Native Authentication automatec.exe /refreshdependencies /dbconname “[DBConName]” /user [Username] [Password] • DBConnName: The name of the Blue Prism Connection (as displayed within the client interface on the device where the command is being executed). • Username: The username used to log into the environment accessed using the specified Blue Prism Connection (only required where not using single sign-on for the Blue Prism platform) • Password: The password used to log into the environment accessed using the specified Blue Prism Connection (only required where not using single sign-on for the Blue Prism platform)


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Release notes Version 5.0.33 – August 2017 Notices Database Changes

This release requires the Blue Prism database to be version 217.

Login Agent

The version of Login Agent that is provided with this release of Blue Prism has the same functionality as the version provided with the previous version of Blue Prism.

Important Notices

None.

Fixes and minor improvements Description of change

Reference

A fix is provided to address an important security vulnerability present in Version 5 editions numbered 5.0.11 and above. The vulnerability is such that the key used by the Encryption Scheme was incorrectly included in the package of the data provided to the Blue Prism client in the following situations: •

When using the built-in Encryption Business Object

•

When using AutomateC /setencrypt command line method

•

When deleting an Encryption Scheme record within the User Interface

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Whilst the key was never incorrectly presented in the UI, this issue represents a security vulnerability which could be exploited.


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Version 5.0.32 – July 2017 Notices Database Changes


Login Agent

The version of Login Agent provided within the Blue Prism installer provides additional features over previous versions.

Important Notices

None

Enhancements A number of new features are introduced in this version of Blue Prism. Description of change

Reference

When using Blue Prism native authentication, users passwords are now stored using an updated hashing algorithm. When users login or reset their password, the password hash will be stored as a PBKDF2 32-byte hash. •

The hash is generated using a 32-byte randomly generated salt; based on 64000 hash rounds; and is base64 encoded.

•

The 32-byte user-specific salt is regenerated each time the user resets their password using RNGCryptoServiceProvider.

•

The password validation also uses constant time comparison.

When using the /serverconfig command to create or update a Blue Prism server configuration, if no Encryption Schemes have been configured, a new Encryption Scheme record will be created. By default, this will use AES-256 (AesCryptoService) and a randomly generated key. A new /encryptionscheme switch can also be used to change the encryption algorithm from the default. The following encryption algorithm choices can be specified: •

1=Triple DES

•

2=AES-256 RijndaelManaged

•

3=AES-256 AesCryptoService

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The Blue Prism Native Sign-on Settings form has been updated to allow a configuration where the system should both prevent the re-use of password that matches the previous x passwords, and where a password cannot be reused within x days. Previously only one of these options could be configured at any given time.

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User records can now be arranged into a hierarchical group structure to improve the visual management of users within a given Blue Prism environment.

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It is now possible to configure Blue Prism to establish a .NET Remoting connection that does not require a callback connection. This is achieved through use of the Disable Callback Port option when setting up a connection via connection manager. Disabling the callback port will prevent progress bars from presenting incremental progress updates such as when importing a release.

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Description of change

Reference

The ability to use a context menu option to expand or collapse items within a hierarchical group structure has been extended to additional areas including: •

Control Room: Processes, Resources, Work Queues, Schedule task processes, Schedule task resources,

•

Release Manager: Release package contents

•

System: Object Exposure, Object Management, Process Exposure, Process Management

•

Export: Object tree, Process tree

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The manage user roles functionality has been updated to more obviously show which permission areas a user has been granted permissions to. Where a user has been assigned partial permissions within a permission area, a grey tick will now be displayed.

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The encoding algorithm used when storing potentially sensitive Blue Prism information within configuration files has been updated to use AES-256. This affects data such as encryption scheme keys; and for scenarios where SQL native authentication is used, the authentication credentials.

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Fixes and minor improvements A number of fixes and minor improvements are introduced with this version. Description of change

Reference

A fix is provided to address the issue where connecting to an exposed Blue Prism Web Service causes an unhandled exception when the Blue Prism environment is configured for single sign-on.

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An issue where disabling logging on a long-running process causes the process memory usage to continually increase has been addressed. This means that such memory issues should no longer be experienced when disabling session logging.

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When using HTML spy mode, browser security restrictions would prevent the user from identifying elements inside an iframe, if the source of that iframe is a website in a different domain. This has been resolved by utilizing the Active Accessibility (AA) method to spy elements in cross-domain iframes.

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The no disconnect option that is provided when terminating an emulator connection has been updated so that it no longer suppresses a dispose operation. This ensures the dispose occurs in a deterministic way to address unexpected behaviour following use of the no disconnect option.

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This applies to all native emulator connection types available within Application Manager A number of improvements have been made for when interacting with external applications to ensure that the target application is aware of changes: •

Interacting with a combo box using Win32 or AA now correctly fires the expected events.

•

The java Select Item action has been updated to correctly work with combo boxes.

•

TreeView BeforeCheck and AfterCheck events are now fired when interacting with a WinForms TreeView node using Win32.

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When editing a calendar (under System Calendar), on a machine configured to use a different time zone than the one configured for the Blue Prism server device, time was deducted from each holiday each time the save action was performed. This has now been addressed.

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A number of minor improvements have been made to harden the product:

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•

To reduce susceptibility to injection attacks on dynamically generated LDAP queries (which may reveal limited user account information) LDAP queries are now appropriately parametrized.

•

The response mechanism when authenticating command line or HTTP requests has been updated. USER SET is now returned to indicate that a user has been specified. Previously this message indicated that a specified user name is valid. User name and password combinations are also rejected as a unit if either the user name or password is invalid.

When retrieving a Credential Manager credential, credentials containing multi-byte characters would be incorrectly decrypted. This issue has now been addressed.

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The functionality whereby a Runtime Resource requests a credential from the store for use when executing an automation has been updated to validate that the session identifier relates to an active session.

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Reference

An issue has been addressed where it was possible to create and export a collection that could not be reimported when the initial value for the collection item was configured to contain invalid characters. Invalid characters can no longer be saved within an initial value for a collection.

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When importing a release, an error was presented if that release contained the default Dashboard. A SQL exception error was received if the user selected to overwrite the default dashboard or to import a default dashboard with a different ID.

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The Contains Image condition within a wait stage has been updated to correctly work in scenarios where the match image is smaller than the search region.

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The context menu items within Queue Management have been updated to ensure that the ability to pause a queue is only available for queues that are not currently paused; and that the ability to resume a queue is only available for a queue that is currently paused.

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An issue has been addressed where it was possible to create and export a collection that could not be reimported when the initial value for the collection item was configured to contain invalid characters. Invalid characters can no longer be saved within an initial value for a collection.

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A caching issue has been resolved to address an issue where an object or process may be incorrectly shown as locked under the Studio tab.

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Exceptions are no longer presented due to use of a machine name that is longer than 20 characters when using automatic archiving.

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An issue has been addressed whereby adding a second row to a collection clears an initial value entered into the subsequent row.

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Viewing a Queues references from within the System Work Queues area has been updated so that the references viewer is now presented.

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An update has been applied to address an issue where an exception was presented when deleting Alerts from the System Alerts screen.

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A number of minor issues have been resolved which occurred in Blue Prism environments that were configured to register Runtime Resources using their FQDN. These included incorrect evaluation of access to credential records when secured based on Resource(s).

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The Win32 listbox select item action has been updated to allow an item to be selected when featured in a list box which supports multi-select.

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A number of minor changes have been made the environment variables functionality including:

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•

Prevent creation of environment variables that do not have a name.

•

Disable Find References functionality prior to creating the environment variable.

•

The information presented when deleting an environment variable has been improved.

The correct help page is now provided when using Queue Management.


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Reference

A number of improvements have been made to the structure of SQL queries that cannot be configured to use parameterized input values to further protect against SQL injection attacks. While all queries only accept internally defined values, prior to being used the values are subject to specific validation: •

Variables that represent table names in dynamically constructed SQL statements are validated to ensure that they represent a genuine table and that they only contain allowable characters.

•

Variables that represent field names in dynamically constructed SQL statements are validated to ensure that they represent genuine field names and that they only contain allowable characters.

•

All field values that are included in SQL statements remain protected by using SQL parameters.


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Login Agent The installers for the latest version of Login Agent, at the time that this Blue Prism release was made available, are provided within the Installers folder within the Blue Prism install location. The version of Login Agent that is provided with this release of Blue Prism has additional functionality over Login Agent 5.0.24. If upgrading Login Agent from an earlier version than 5.0.24, it is necessary to ensure that processes that interact with Login Agent Runtime Resource(s) are updated to use the VBO provided within the included release file. Fixes and minor improvements The following changes provided: Description of change

Reference

Login Agent Runtime Resource no longer use the .NET Remoting callback port. This reduces conflicts when a conventional Runtime Resource and a Login Agent Runtime Resource are configured to use a connection that uses a static callback port. The clash would have previously occurred when the conventional Runtime Resource starts up before the Login Agent Runtime Resource has shutdown.

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The Login Agent service has been updated to detect when a successful login has occurred on the device and to automatically instruct the Login Agent Runtime Resource to shut down. If the Login Agent Runtime Resource is still executing a process, it will be granted 45 seconds to complete its operation before being terminated.

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Login Agent Sample Processes and Visual Business Object updates No changes have been applied to the sample processes and associated items that are provided within the Blue Prism release file (*.bprelease) that is available once Login Agent has been installed.


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Visual Business Object updates A number of Visual Business Objects (VBOs) are provided within the Blue Prism release but changes are only applied when a specific VBO is explicitly imported. Any use of these VBOs should be re-verified following an import to ensure compatibility with any change of behaviour

Calendars Description of change

Reference

The default runmode for the Business Object has been updated from Exclusive to Background. This means that processes that rely only on this Business Object may unexpectedly now operate under a different runmode. Excel Description of change

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Reference

The Excel VBO has been updated to address an issue when using .NET 4.0 and above which resulted in dates being saved in the format MM/DD/YY. Dates are now saved in the locale specific format of the system being used.

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Changes have been made to how the Get Worksheet as a Collection action copies and pastes data to the system clipboard. Previously, the action would intermittently not return any data.

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The code stage on the Get Worksheet as a Collection Offset now uses the appropriate User Header input rather than a fixed value.

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When using the Get Worksheet as a Collection action to import a spreadsheet with cells that contained tab characters, it would incorrectly convert the tab spaces into character spaces. This has now been addressed.

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Utility – Collection Manipulation Description of change

Reference

Local and UTC datetime conversion actions have now been integrated into the Collection Manipulation VBO. Users can now convert datetimes from Local/UTC and UTC/Local using any installed time zone.


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Version 5.0.30 – April 2017 Notices Database Changes


Login Agent


Important Notices

This release addresses a number of issues that were introduced in 5.0.29 therefore the notices associated with 5.0.29 should also be reviewed.

Enhancements There are no new features introduced in this version of Blue Prism.


Reference

The scenario has been addressed where using Blue Prism 5.0.29 to edit a read stage which uses the Get Bounds action on a Win32 element within a Business Object causes the read action to be deleted and renders the stage unusable until it is reworked using a different read action. The deprecated Get Bounds action will now be present in the action list in addition to the recently introduced Get Relative Bounds action.

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The issue has been addressed where the initial value of password fields within a collection is incorrectly represented within an export of a Business Object or Process and results in a situation where the exported file cannot be correctly imported

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An update has been made to address an issue where an exception message is presented when the Element Type value of a Win32 element within Application Manager is updated.

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Visual Business Object updates A number of Visual Business Objects (VBOs) are provided within the Blue Prism release but changes are only applied when a specific VBO is explicitly imported. Any use of these VBOs should be re-verified following an import to ensure compatibility with any change of behaviour Utility – Collection Manipulation Description of change

Reference

The actions listed below have been updated to ensure that the field definitions associated with the input collection are appropriately transferred to the output collection. This addresses scenarios where date values and time values were incorrectly converted to UTC. Actions: Copy Rows, Merge Collection, Read Collection Field, Split Collection, Transpose Collection.


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Version 5.0.29 – April 2017 Notices Database Changes


Login Agent


Important Notices

See notice below.

This version updates the mechanism of writing data to the local Blue Prism configuration files on Blue Prism devices. Downgrading to earlier versions of Blue Prism on these devices will result in the configuration files being unreadable.


Reference

In addition to the checks that occur within Blue Prism Clients, a number of security improvements have been made to the Blue Prism Server to re-validate that the requesting user is both authenticated and authorized. These changes are part of an initiative to support additional deployment models.

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The following changes have also been applied: •

The permission Security - Password Options has been renamed to Security - Sign-on Settings

•

The permission System - Single Sign On has been removed. Users with this permission will now have Security - Sign-on Settings

•

User Roles are now managed under Security - User Roles which is secured by a new permission of the same name.

•

For Blue Prism native environnments Security - Password Options are now configured under Security - Sign-on Settings

•

For Blue Prism SSO environments System - Single Sign On is now configured under Security - Sign-on Settings

A number of enhancements have been introduced that provide additional configurability in relation to how Runtime Resources authenticate with the Blue Prism platform: •

When starting a Runtime Resource it is now possible to define that a /public runtime should authenticate through use of the /user or /sso switch

•

A system wide setting is provided that will prevent anonymous public Runtime Resources from establishing a connection. (disabled by default).

•

A new security role named Runtime Resources is provided for use with Blue Prism user accounts that will be used by authenticating Runtime Resources.


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Reference

A number of changes have been made to ensure that sensitive items such as passwords are not held in plaintext in memory reducing the likelihood of a password being available in plaintext in a memory dump on a Blue Prism device.

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In conjunction with this, a new password element type has been added for Win32 application models which ensures that a password can be written to a password box without exposing the contents in plaintext within the managed process memory. Additionally it is now possible to optionally prevent passwords from being pasted into Blue Prism password controls. The Generate Password action has been updated to use the RNGCryptoServiceProvider for generating random values. This increases the randomness of the passwords generated using this feature.

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The option to view Unavailable Resources Only is now provided in the context menu of the Resources pane within Control Room.

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When attaching to an application via a navigate stage, it is now possible to additionally attach using the Process ID or Username.

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Please note that attaching by Username increases the time required for the attach to occur Runtime Resources and Interactive Clients which have established a Blue Prism Server connection now display the server name within the user interface.

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This information is primarily provided to help with troubleshooting and is refreshed both periodically and when a new connection is detected. The layout of the System Settings form and the associated help file has been updated.

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A new Win32 action has been added: Get Relative Bounds. This action returns the bounds of an element within a parent window and replaces the Get Bounds action.

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Reference

Blue Prism Web Services can now receive multi-byte UTF-8 characters in the web service request.

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It is now possible to send an Immediate Stop to a Runtime Resource which has been sent a Request Stop instruction. This addresses a scenario where a stop request sent to a process which does not cater for stop requests could not be terminated from the Control Room interface.

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When configuring an Application Model for a browser-based application the configurable option to exclude HTC components will be enabled by default.

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An improvement has been made to address an issue that occurred in some environments when using Send Key Events. The improvement better supports the use of modifier keys (Shift, Ctrl, Alt) in conjunction with keys such as Home, End, Page Up, Page Down, Cursor keys etc.).

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Reference

An issue where date values and time values in collections were incorrectly converted to UTC when the collection was filtered has been addressed by ensuring that date values and time values are not automatically converted to UTC. This change does not affect datetime data types. See also the Visual Business Object updates.

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The SingleSignOn function provided for use within Calculation stages to indicate if the current environment is configured for Blue Prism Single Sign-on authentication has been updated to address an issue where the result of the check did not reflect the authentication mode being used. Prior to this fix it incorrectly reported whether the device was connected via an Application Server.

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An update has been provided to address the issue where it was necessary to reload a Business Object after creating a new model to avoid receiving a navigate error: "No target application information has been set".

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When a Runtime Resource is re-started following a hard shutdown, any processes that were in a stopping state will now be appropriately marked as terminated.

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A number of improvements have been applied for natively consuming third-party web services and a number of additional scenarios that feature the following are now supported:

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•

blank namespaces

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use of different namespaces for incoming and outgoing requests

•

use of multiple namespaces within a request

•

nested complex types

The scenario where closing Blue Prism causes the application to hang for up to do 2 minutes has been addressed.

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The number of scenarios that result in an unexpected error when navigating to a URL within a process have been reduced.

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Additionally a new option has been provided within the Application Model that indicates that it should Perform Actions on current tab only. This option requires the browser to be displaying the intended tab and improves behaviour consistency. The information in the help has been updated to clarify the expected behaviour when restricting a Credential to only be available to users with certain security roles. It now explains that applying a restriction by security role requires the Runtime Resource to be operating in the context of a user who has that role.

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When using Blue Prism native authentication the reset password screen has been updated to remove a restriction which prevented passwords longer than 20 characters from being used.

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An issue where selecting Today as a Session Management filter did not result in the list being refiltered has been addressed.

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The custom filtering of the Total Work Time column within Queue Management has been updated to be more intuitive. Additionally it is no longer required for users specify milliseconds within the filter values.

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Reference

The generic error message presented when executing a loop stage which has not been associated with a collection has been improved to clarify that a collection needs to be specified.

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The in-product help has been updated to provide a clearer explanation of the DateDiff calculation stage function.

bg-265

The process context menu option to unlock a process now presents an error when it fails to unlock a process. Note that the context menu option cannot be used to unlock a process that was locked on a different machine, this instead requires an administrator to double-click on the process and use the Unlocking Wizard.

bg-185 9854

An issue that presented an exception as a result of pressing alt + tab while modifying the data type of a new Data Item has been addressed.

bg-302

The reconnection logic for Interactive Clients has been updated to improve the behaviour in a range of scenarios when the connection with the Blue Prism Server is dropped.

us-419 bg-104

An improvement has been made to address the scenario where a System.Xml exception was presented if there were unexpected carriage return characters at the end of Web Service XML definition.

bg-172 9874

Visual Business Object updates A number of Visual Business Objects (VBOs) are provided within the Blue Prism release but changes are only applied when a specific VBO is explicitly imported. Any use of these VBOs should be re-verified following an import to ensure compatibility with any change of behaviour Data - OLEDB Description of change

Reference

A number of updates have been made to the VBO: •

An optional parameter which accepts a full connection string has been added to the Set Connection String action.

•

An additional Execute action has been added which accepts SQL.


us-507

Reference

The Reverse Collection action has been updated to ensure that the field definitions associated with the input collection are appropriately transferred to the output collection. This addresses scenarios where date values and time values were incorrectly converted to UTC.

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This does not affect datetime values.


Page 21 of 51

Version 5.0.24 – February 2017 Notices Database Changes


Login Agent

The version of Login Agent provided within the Blue Prism installer provides additional features over previous versions and it is strongly recommended that it is applied along with the associated VBO.

Important Notices

Once an environment configured with Blue Prism Single Sign-on has been upgraded to this version, the settings should be re-validated under the System -> SSO tab, and within the System -> Users -> Manage Roles form. When configuring Blue Prism for Single sign-on please note that Blue Prism does not support built-in Groups or those with derived membership such as Domain Users or Authenticated Users.


Reference

The Blue Prism Single Sign-on capability has been extended to allow users that reside within a trusted domain within the common Active Directory Forest to be assigned Blue Prism access and permissions.

ep-12

A number of additional improvements have also been introduced: •

The form used to select the domain and the Active Directory Security Group that will be associated with the Blue Prism System Administrator role has been improved.

•

An Active Directory Security Group selector has been introduced to simply the process of associating Active Directory Security Groups with Blue Prism Security Roles.

•

The Manage User Roles form now displays the list of users that are associated with a given Blue Prism security role.

•

The User's Group Membership form now clearly displays which security groups a user is a member of.

•

The Synchronise Users action has been replaced with a Refresh User List action which allows users to manually initiate a re-evaluation of all users associated with Blue Prism security roles. Users which are no longer present or enabled in Active Directory, or which are no longer believed to be associated with a Blue Prism security role are marked as inactive.

•

The context menu of the Users list now provides an option to show inactive users.

•

When re-configuring Blue Prism to use Active Directory Security Groups from a different domain, the previous Security Groups mappings are now cleared.


Page 22 of 51


Reference

The license manager has been updated to provide the following additional features: •

Multiple licenses can be stored concurrently

•

The entitlement is calculated across all active licenses

•

It is possible to add future licenses

•

The view can be configured to include historical licenses

•

The warning messages have been updated to indicate when the license entitlement is expected to reduce in the next 31 days.

•

The command line methods for managing license keys have been updated to cater for the new functionality

The filters within Control Room have been updated to provide more granular visibility. The improvements include: •

Additional options have been added to the date/time filters within Session Management and Work Queue contents view

•

The date/time filters for Work Queue contents can additionally accepted typed values such as: last 2 minutes, next 4 hours, last 2 days. Ranges can be supported through use a comma e.g.: "> 1/3/2016, <3/3/2016"

New actions (Launch Mainframe, Attach Mainframe, Detach Mainframe, and Terminate Mainframe) are provided within a Navigate stage when working with Hummingbird emulators via the COM API.

ep-11

us-227

us-337 us-316

These actions will only be applied to new Business Objects, or existing Business Objects whose navigate stages are appropriately edited (e.g. by re-specifying the application element on the stage). Support is now provided for deploying the Blue Prism database on Microsoft SQL Server 2016

us-238

When configuring an Application Model that uses an External Application Manager mode it is now possible to define a global timeout for Navigate, Read and Write stages so that an exception will be thrown if the target application does not respond within the defined time.

us-65 9570

Encryption schemes have been extended with an additional AES-256 algorithm. Users configuring an encryption scheme to use AES-256 can now select to use the AesCryptoService provider.

us-285

When using the action Read Text with OCR, an additional parameter is now exposed which allows the user to override the Page Segmentation Mode that will be used. Information on the segmentation modes provided is included within the product help.

us-349 9439

A number of core product changes have been introduced in relation to Login Agent:

us-233 us-61 9863 bg-153

•

Following the install of Blue Prism, the Login Agent Installers will be automatically placed on the local device within the Blue Prism Install directory.

•

Blue Prism Runtime Resources are now able to instruct Login Agent Runtime Resources that are configured to secure inbound communications using a certificate to shut-down.

•

Information about Login Agent is now included in the in-product help.

It is now possible to export the lists of schedules from within Control Room as CSV or text.


us-232

Page 23 of 51


Reference

A new internal action is provided to allow additional Credential Properties to be set via a process. If the Credential Property is not found on the selected Credential, a new property will be added.

us-353

A number of updates have been made to the view of Users:

us-264 us-265 bg-119

•

The list view is now used as the default view.

•

The columns presented in the default view have been updated.

•

When using BP Native authentication, the delete users option is now only visible to users with appropriate permissions.

Functionality is now provided to allow design errors reported within the process validation screen to be copied to the clipboard.

bg-133 6765

The scheduler reports in Control Room now include the name of the scheduling server.

us-430 9866

The command line switch /queueclearedwork now allows the use of an /age parameter to allow items to be selectively cleared.

us-350

The delay between entering Control Room and seeing the local processing engine has been significantly reduced, when using an interactive client that has been configured with the setting "Start the process engine on this machine when users sign into Blue Prism"

us-226

The automatec command viewschedtimetable has been updated to support schedules whose name is numeric.

bg-90

A number of minor improvements have been made to the in-product help:

us-348 us-272 6260

•

Information has been added relating to the command line options for managing Resource Pools.

•

Information relating to the FormatDateTime action has been added.

•

Pressing F1 within Control Room now displays the intended help page.

The ManagedSpyLib no longer requires Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2013 to be installed.

bg-72

System.dll has been added to the default referenced assemblies for code stages so that users are no longer required to manually add it to use commonly used classes.

bg-121 6764

System.Data.dll has been added to the default namespace imports for code stages so that users are no longer required to refer to fully qualified names of commonly used classes such as DataTable, DataRow etc.

bg-132 6763


Page 24 of 51


Reference

An improvement has been made to the caching mechanism on Blue Prism Application Servers so that they no longer need to be restarted following a reconfiguration of the Blue Prism Security Roles.

9838

The reconnection logic for Runtime Resources and Interactive Clients that have dropped their connection to a Blue Prism Application Server has been updated to re-query DNS for the IP address of the server, prior to reattempting the connection.

bg-126

An issue whereby items were only sortable if they were featured within a group or folder has been addressed. This allows the view of available resources to be ordered by clicking the column headings, even if no groups have been configured and all resources reside in a single list.

bg-43 9713

A review of the event logs produced by the Blue Prism Interactive Client and Blue Prism Application servers has been undertaken to both reduce the volume of entries and improve the quality of the items that are generated.

us-364

An issue whereby a Runtime Resource that is within a ResourcePool could not retrieve a credential unless it was available to all resources has been addressed.

us-347 9815

Using Control Room on a device that has not been previously registered as a Runtime Resource to stop a Process operating on a Runtime Resource no longer results in an error.

bg-140

An Interactive Client caching issue has been addressed to ensure that the latest configured connection settings are used when attempting to connect to a Blue Prism Server.

bg-103

An improvement has been made to address the scenario where online Runtime Resources were being polled to verify their status too frequently.

bg-173

The logic responsible for carrying out the data encryption for credentials and work queues have been updated to properly use Clear and Dispose methods, to appropriately release resources and clear potentially sensitive information from memory.

bg-94 bg-99 9787

An issue has been addressed where if a users’ password was reset by a system administrator, the change would only be applied if additional information was also changed.

bg-177

An issue has been addressed where a business object would attempt to match using parameters configured with a dynamic match type, even if the parameter attribute excluded from the match criteria.

bg-145

The command line switch /setencrypt has been updated to require the name of the encryption scheme rather than a system calculated name.

bg-95 bg-100

A fix has been applied to cater for an incorrect conversion when saving processes that contain write stages expressions that include a semi-colon, when working in non-UK locales.

bg-120

Following the creation of a Queue via the User Interface, it is now automatically selected to allow further configuration.

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Page 25 of 51


Reference

The SAP spy mode has been updated to address an issue where by a cursor movement could cause the spy mode to revert to Win32.

bg-106

Output parameters are now correctly displayed on the relevant action stages within the session logs.

bg-142

The issue where exporting a User's process alerts causes an unhandled exception has been addressed.

bg-101 bg-97

A fix has been applied to address the scenario where Blue Prism is installed on Windows XP and it references dlls which are incompatible with Windows XP.

bg-69

A number of minor updates have been introduced to improve the behaviour when opening, closing or saving a business object or process.

us-335 bg-102 9792

An issue has been addressed where the check for errors when designing a business object does not appropriately reflect the currently selected parameters.

bg-147

An issue has been addressed whereby using Ctrl + A to select all within a business object or process only highlights the elements when the cursor is subsequently moved.

4651


Page 26 of 51

Login Agent The installers for the latest version of Login Agent, at the time that this Blue Prism release was made available, are provided within the Installers folder within the Blue Prism install location. The version of Login Agent that is provided with this release of Blue Prism has additional functionality over Login Agent 5.0.23. If upgrading Login Agent from an earlier version it is necessary to ensure that processes that interact with Login Agent Runtime Resource(s) are updated to use the VBO provided within the included release file. Fixes and minor improvements The following changes provided: Description of change

Reference

The Login Agent service has been updated to be able to instruct Login Agent Runtime Resources that are configured to secure inbound communications using a certificate to shut-down.

9863 bg-153

Login Agent no longer requires Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2013 to be installed.

us-90

Login Agent Sample Processes and Visual Business Object updates The following changes are applied to the sample processes and associated items that are provided within the Blue Prism release file (*.bprelease) that is available once Login Agent has been installed. It is necessary to use the provided VBO with this edition of Login Agent as it will not function correctly with legacy versions of the VBO. Any use of the provided example Processes or Login Agent VBO should be re-verified following an import to ensure compatibility with any change of behaviour. Description of change

Reference

The Change Password action has been updated to use an alternative method, due to Windows Update KB3167679 blocking the previous functionality.


us-224

Page 27 of 51

Visual Business Object updates A number of Visual Business Objects (VBOs) are provided within the Blue Prism release but changes are only applied when a specific VBO is explicitly imported. Any use of these VBOs should be re-verified following an import to ensure compatibility with any change of behaviour Utility - Strings Description of change

Reference

The VBO has been updated to correctly handle the presence of '{' within the Escape Sendkeys String action.


bg-129

Page 28 of 51

Version 5.0.23 – October 2016 Database changes This release requires the Blue Prism database to be version 208.


Reference

Blue Prism is now certified for installation on Windows 10. This includes support for launching and spying "Windows Apps" provided in Windows 10.

us-104 us-178

As part of the certification it is noted that navigate stages that use Select Item via Active Accessiblity to interact with a combo / selection box no longer triggers a selection changed event. A number of minor updates have been made to the product help to: •

Ensure information relating to the Additional SQL Connection Parameters field is available via the help button on the connection configuration screen.

•

Provide considerations when using IBM PCOMM for processing multi-byte data. This includes information relating to configuring the emulator to compress shift-in and shift-out characters

A number of improvements to the get and set cursor position functionality are included: •

The functionality has been extended for other supported emulators when connecting via the COM API and it has been explicitly verified for use via the COM API with IBM PCOMM; HostExplorer 15; and Attachmate Extra! X-treme 9.3.

•

The error message that is presented when using set cursor position outside of the emulator boundary has been improved.

9693 9710

4824 9498 9507 9670 9728

The logic applied when calculating the length of a multi-byte string as part of a read operation when using IBM PCOMM (via the COM API) has been updated to account for an undocumented vendorbug within the emulator.

9512

A number of updates have been made to the audit history functionality:

4964 9673 9720 bg-60 9451 9452 9502

•

An audit history record is now created when an object or process is created or imported.

•

Password change events are now audited.

•

Updates to Wait stage choice labels now result in an audit history record being generated.

•

The results pane is now appropriately reset when switching between viewing the history of an object and that of a process via the viewer within the System area.

•

When exporting using the audit comparison tool, the headings on the screens now appropriately distinguish between processes and business objects

Environment themes are now applied to additional screens including: Export Object; Export Process; Auto-save; API Documentation Help; Export Log; SSO Group Membership

9450

Users are now warned if they enter an Environment Variable name that exceeds the maximum allowed length

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Page 29 of 51


Reference

A number of minor enhancements have been applied that improve the resilience of loading and saving the Blue Prism machine and user configuration files.

9690


Reference

A number of fixes have been applied in relation to connectivity problems between the scheduler (or control room) and the Runtime Resources: •

The visibility of errors in connections with Runtime Resources has been improved

•

A number of fixes have been applied to the Control Room and Scheduler behaviour to address an issue whereby missing timeout logic compounded connectivity issues to leave resources unreachable and unusable.

•

The scheduler time out message has been updated to address a grammatical error.

9624 9725 9731 9671

The thread-management logic applied when a Blue Prism component re-establishes a connection with an Application Server has been improved to address an issue whereby the machinename parameter was being set to null.

bg-40

A number of updates have been applied to provide compatibility when deploying Blue Prism on devices configured with a Turkish locale.

9605 us-64

A fix has been applied to the Unlocking Wizard whereby it was not possible to unlock a process that had been locked using a different device.

bg-36

The GetIEVersionMajor action now returns the correct value when using IE10 or IE11

9669 9633 bg-23

An update has been made to allow the Roles report to be run against a Blue Prism environment that has been configured for Single Sign-on

9620

The following improvements have been made to the behaviour of Work Queues: •

When deleting the last item from a queue, the current queue remains selected, instead of switching to another queue

•

The view of queues on the left now accurately reflects the selected queue

9662 us-113 9733

An update has been made to the logic used when saving a configuration file to address the error: BluePrism.BPCoreLib.EventLogger not serializable.

9625

The following improvements have been implemented to the handling of processes exposed as web services:

9641 9664 bg-41

•

The correct process name is now displayed after it is changed when defining the web service.

•

Collections named with a space or underscore are now supported


Page 30 of 51


Reference

The behaviour when adding a new row via the User Interface to a blank nested collection has been updated.

bg-47

The following issues have been addressed with copying Wait stages:

3788 us-122 9613

•

Text shows old elements from copied stage, even after updating elements

•

Unhandled exception when copying wait stages that have outgoing links to other stages

An update has been provided to address the scenario whereby using the Retry action on a work item that is associated with an encrypted work queue results in the error: Internal: Unexpected error Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1.

bg-42

The logic applied when a non-privileged windows user takes an action which requires elevation has been updated to support scenarios where a separate user's credentials are used as part of the elevation process.

9634

An error when using the Set Item Checked action (list view) functionality on a number of recent operating systems has been addressed.

5870

The Select Item action in a navigate stage has been updated to allow items to be found by index when the Item Text is not specified.

9674

An issue whereby it wasn't possible to save changes when reducing the permissions assigned to a selected security role has been addressed.

9423

An issue has been addressed whereby changes to a user role were not saved due to the number of changes being applied resulting in an audit record which was too large to be stored in the database.

9651

The issue where is not possible to delete an environment variable from the system after it has been included within a Release Manager package has been addressed.

9553

When configuring schedules, it is no longer possible to drag records onto others of the same type. (E.g. processes cannot be dragged onto processes; resources cannot be dragged onto resources).

9567

A fix has been applied to prevent the Reset FQDN option from being incorrectly available within the Resource Management panel

9568

The blue question mark next to the option to Manage User Roles has been configured to link to an appropriate help page.

9569

Object Studio is now configured to prevent invalid links from being established from Wait and Choice stages

9657

Blocks are now correctly labelled as "Blocks" rather than "Stages" within the visual process flow

9645

The styling of the help button has been updated to be suitable for use with standard deployments of Windows 10

bg-22

The Runtime Resource user interface has been updated to always display the event timestamp. Times are shown in UTC.

9421

Minor improvements have been made to the partner branding capability


us-206

Page 31 of 51

Visual Business Object updates A number of Visual Business Objects (VBOs) are provided within the Blue Prism release but changes are only applied when a specific VBO is explicitly imported. Any use of these VBOs should be re-verified following an import to ensure compatibility with any change of behaviour Collection Manipulation Description of change

Reference

Use of the Get Collection Fields action to output a nested collection now results in the target collection being configured with the appropriate data types. Excel Description of change

9539

Reference

The Get Worksheet Range as Collection action has been configured to activate the required worksheet prior before to selecting the range.


bg-46

Page 32 of 51

Version 5.0.21 – September 2016 Database changes This release requires the Blue Prism database to be version 206.


Reference

The Blue Prism database connection screen now allows custom connection parameters to be specified (e.g. “encrypt=true; trustservercertificate=true”). This can be used to instruct Blue Prism to establish an encrypted connection with the SQL Server for scenarios where encrypted connections are not forced by the SQL instance.

9050

The Blue Prism user interface has been updated to provide the date and time that the user account was last used to log in to Blue Prism.

9419


Reference

Blue Prism processes or objects which are exposed as web services can now receive nested collections as input parameters and return nested collections as output parameters.

9640

The Get Report Data action associated with Work Queues functionality has been updated to work with recent work queue optimizations.

9594

Execute permissions for the usp_rethrow stored procedure introduced in 5.0.18 have been granted to the SQL role bpa_ExecuteSP_System to remove the requirement for DBAs to manually grant execute permissions to users who require the functionality provided by this procedure.

9638

An issue with the Remove Row action within the Collections business object when processing duplicate rows has been addressed.

9644

Visual Business Object updates A number of Visual Business Objects (VBOs) are provided within the Blue Prism release but changes are only applied when a specific VBO is explicitly imported. Any use of these VBOs should be re-verified following an import to ensure compatibility with any change of behaviour Excel Description of change

Reference

An update has been made to the Get Worksheet as Collection action to better cater for scenarios where tabs, newlines and quotes are featured within cell values.


9235

Page 33 of 51

Version 5.0.18 – July 2016 A number of fixes are included in this release which address issues introduced in 5.0.12 relating to Work Queue functionality.

Database changes This release requires the Blue Prism database to be version 204.


Reference

Support is now provided for Micro Focus Reflections 16.0 through use of .NET API.

9482

The Available Resources view in Control Room has been updated to provide the last connection error message. This provides insight into the reasons behind why a connection could not be established.

9547

A number of improvements have been made to the shared application models functionality:

9425 9453 9455

•

Business Objects must be manually marked as shareable via the properties form in order to allow the associated Application Model to be shared by other Business Objects.

•

Only Business Objects that are marked as shareable are presented as shareable models within the Application Modeller Wizard.

•

The Business Object properties form indicates whether a Business Object is shareable; is linked to a shareable model; or is standalone.

•

The product help has been updated with information which explains the difference in behavior when utilizing a shareable vs standalone object.

The Newtonsoft.Json.dll (Version 1.3.1) that is required by the JSON Visual Business Object is now installed alongside Blue Prism which removes the requirement to manually distribute this dll to all devices that leverage this functionality.

9559

Support is now provided to allow advanced implementers to deploy certificates to Runtime Resources. When appropriately configured this will apply certificate-based encryption to the instructional communications received by these devices. (E.g. Instructions received from Control Room(s), Application Server Scheduler(s) and third parties consuming exposed web services). Where devices configured in this way expose Blue Prism web services, they must now be addressed using a HTTPS prefix.

9500 9549

Additionally a system-wide configurable option is provided which can be used to prevent Runtime Resources from connecting if they are not configured to provide certificate-based encryption. This does not apply to local processing engines when they are configured to automatically start when a user logs into the Blue Prism client. The default audit log viewer settings have been updated to list entries by date.

9420

The command line /serverconfig option has been updated to automatically create a default encryption scheme.

9468


Page 34 of 51


Reference

Fixes have been implemented to address the following Work Queue related issues introduced in 5.0.12: •

An error was incorrectly presented when contention occurred in the Get Next Item action.

•

Tag filtering with wildcards did not behave as expected when using the Get Next Item action.

An update has been made to handle the following error that can occur when interacting with Iframes within Internet Explorer 11 when using the HTML spy-mode:

9552 9555

9363

RPC_E_DISCONNECTED - The object invoked has disconnected from its clients based error. The issue whereby a user with read-only access to Work Queues could update the status of associated work items, and pause/resume the queue has been addressed.

8423

The locking logic applied when opening a Business Object or Process in Studio has been updated to address an error that was presented when the device being used had not previously been registered on port 8181 within the database.

5326

A number of Active Accessibility actions that consistently fail in all versions of 5.0 have been updated: AAFocus; AASendKeys; ContainsColour; UniformColour.

9521

The Runtime Resource listeners have been updated to no longer include user input in return messages which addresses potential cross-site (and cross-domain) scripting scenarios.

9562

The scenario whereby Blue Prism only presented a meaningful error when Internet Explorer failed if the URL has a http:// prefix has been addressed such that an error is appropriately presented irrespective of its prefix.

9483

The Global Code tab on the Business Object Properties form has been updated to fix an issue where the scrollbar and Check Code button were not displayed.

9561

A number of issues that were experienced when using telnet commands when connected to a Runtime Resource operating Blue Prism v5.0.7 and above have been addressed.

9374 9515

A minor update has been applied to the product help to indicate that a change introduced in HP Teemtalk v7.0 removes support for DDE or HLLAPI integration resulting in the requirement to use alternative techniques when working with this third-party product.

9527

The Session Log Viewer has been updated so that it no longer presents an error when switching between the Grid and List views.

9531

The approach used to present the highlight boxes when using Application Modeller to identify onscreen elements has been subject to efficiency improvements.

9513

The label for the system option which is used to enable/disable scheduling (if Application Servers are configured to support it) has been renamed to highlight that it is an environment-wide setting.

9405


Page 35 of 51

Visual Business Object updates A number of Visual Business Objects (VBOs) are provided within the Blue Prism release but changes are only applied when a specific VBO is explicitly imported. Any use of these VBOs should be re-verified following an import to ensure compatibility with any change of behaviour HTTP Description of change

Reference

A number of updates have been made to the HTTP VBO: •

A new HTTP Request action has been added which provides functionality to consume web services that use HTTP certificates and allows Basic Authentication to optionally preemptively send authentication headers prior to a successful challenge response handshake.

•

A new Load Certificate action has been added which provides the ability to load the certificate required for the HTTP Request action.

•

The Post and Post JSON actions have been updated to leverage functionality provided by the HTTP Request action.

OAuth (new) Description of change

9434

Reference

A new Visual Business Object provides the (optional) ability to authenticate with REST web services using OAuth2.0 protocol.

9434

Actions include: Load Certificate; and Request. REST (new) Description of change

Reference

A new Visual Business Object provides support for consuming REST web services by providing additional functionality and leveraging existing HTTP and JSON VBOs.

9434

Actions include: Delete; Get; Post; Put and Setup OAuth.


Page 36 of 51

Version 5.0.12 – April 2016 Database changes This release requires the Blue Prism database to be version 199 therefore a database upgrade will be required.


Reference

A number of optimizations have been implemented to improve the performance when using Get Next Item to retrieve work queue items. These include the introduction of a new locking table to reduce contention and the abstraction of the relevant logic into a stored procedure.

9370

A new option is introduced which provides system administrators with the ability to optionally configure the inter-component communication to use FQDN host names. The options include:

9401

•

Register and communicate using machine (short) name

•

Register using machine (short) name, communicate using FQDN*

•

Register and communicate using FQDN

*if a device registers which matches a previously registered short-name but does not have a matching FQDN, the connection will be rejected. In this scenario the FQDN associated with the short-name can be reset within Resource Management. Following the reset, the affected Runtime Resources and all Controllers should be restarted. System administrators can now optionally configure Blue Prism to prevent registration of new Runtime Resources. When set, Runtime Resources with a name which has not been previously registered in the database will be prevented from registering and will receive an error when connecting.

9300

Support is now provided for launching and attaching to InfoConnect emulators via WinHLLAPI which uses a Windows API calling convention.

9411

The concurrency logic applied when detaching from a target application has been updated which has resulted in a significant improvement in the time taken for the detach action to complete.

9444

The Upgrade Database button logic has been updated to:

9203

•

Remind users that the change is irreversible and that a database backup should be taken first;

•

Disable the button while the upgrade occurs

•

Ensure it only available when an appropriate connection is selected

Environment themes are now applied to additional screens including: API documentation viewer; Log viewer; Queue contents menu option forms; and the Save prompt.


9427

Page 37 of 51


Reference

A number of minor updates have been made to the product help to: •

Provide additional information in relation to the use of MSDN Keys Enumeration when leveraging SendKeyEvents.

•

Clarify how to leverage encryption schemes when configuring work queues through use of the /setencrypt or /resetencrypt command options.

•

Provide additional information about the methods that are available when connected via native TCP to any Runtime Resource.

•

Remove an error that was experienced when clicking the more information icon from within Read, Write, Navigate and Wait stages.

8868 9418 9436 9437

The spy-mode selector has been improved to address an error when switching spy modes if the SAP thick client is installed locally but SAP GUI Scripting is not enabled.

9382

The logic applied when setting credentials has been updated to prevent processes created in previous versions of Blue Prism from returning an error when updating a credential.

9428

The issue where an attribute's Type Name is unexpectedly blank when using Win32 or Active Accessibility spy mode on a 32-bit architecture has been resolved.

9445

The scenario whereby an error is returned when running or stepping through a process or business object which includes a blank or incomplete stage has been addressed.

9440


Page 38 of 51

Version 5.0.11 – March 2016 Database changes This release requires the Blue Prism database to be version 194 therefore a database upgrade will be required.


Reference

The Create Database, Update Database and Configure Database options are now provided within the Connection Configuration area to simplify the use of these features, particularly when changes are required to multiple environments. Additionally these options are no longer available on the File menu.

9203

A number of enhancements have been made to the encryption functionality that is leveraged by Credential Manager and secure Work Queues when encrypting/decrypting the data stored in the database.

9393 9263 9264 9392 9408

•

Encryption schemes are introduced to allow multiple encryption keys to be defined within a single instance of Blue Prism and these can reside either in the database, or separately on the Application Server (recommended).

•

There is now the option to use the 3DES or AES-256 (RijndaelManaged) algorithm

•

The encryption scheme to be used by the Credential Manager and each secure Work Queue is configurable on an on-going basis

•

A command line (AutomateC) key replacement utility is provided which re-encrypts data to use the latest appropriate key.

•

This features the ability to define the batch processing settings for maximum flexibility.

•

Optionally, the Application Server hosted encryption keys can now be located separately within dedicated files. This provides server administrators with additional flexibility to apply custom security and encryption controls to these files.

•

The Internal Business Object - Encryption has been updated to leverage new features provided by Encryption schemes.

The Blue Prism Server service start-up validation has been expanded to ensure that the service has access to the expected Encryption Schemes and the related keys.

9414

A meaningful error message is presented on screen or in the device event log if the service fails to start due to this validation check. It is now possible to access the Edit, Find References, Refresh and Delete actions from the menu button within Studio when either a Business Object or Process is selected.

9073

An update has been made to the Blue Prism Server help page to provide information on a number of recently added controls.

8453

An update has been made to the Blue Prism Scheduler help page to provide information on the requirement for all Application Servers which are responsible for scheduling to be configured with the same time zone settings.

9406


Page 39 of 51


Reference

Options to open a Business Object or Process in View or Test mode are re-introduced to allow users to opt to access in read-only mode.

8600


Reference

Retired Runtime Resources are no longer displayed within the task scheduler.

9355

The option to manually create a new Blue Prism database without using the in-product functionality is re-introduced for Version 5.0. This feature was prevented in early access versions as it was not possible to use the mandatory in-product Configure Database action.

9417

The scenario whereby users leveraging early versions of Blue Prism v5.0 were able to edit Business Objects and Processes even if they only had view permissions has been addressed.

9409

When working with a Blue Prism connection with a type of Availability Group, the connection name is now displayed on the Create Database and Configure Database forms.

9142

A fix has been introduced to address an error that was occasionally presented when renaming collection fields: An error occurred while trying to save the collection field: The field "[Field name]" already exists in the collection definition.

9321

The environment themes are now applied to the File -> New Business Object / Process screens.

9387

The Active Queues logic has been updated to reduce the likelihood of the target number of resources being set to -1 by the system.

9122

The audit log functionality has been updated to identify Business Objects and Processes as different record types.

9343

When an error is experienced when generating a System report, the report will now continue to be generated but will be truncated at the point where it failed.

9305

The Get Image from Window action within the font editor screen has been updated to ensure consistent behavior.

9100


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Version 5.0.10 – March 2016 Database changes This release requires the Blue Prism database to be version 192 therefore a database upgrade will be required.


Reference

The ability to compare a business object or processes with any other business object or process is provided. This includes the ability to compare with a business object or process held within an external file.

9075

SendKeyEvents is extended to natively support sending LCTRL, RCTRL and INS. This functionality is subject to support being provided by the operating system and target applications.

8868

Support is now provided for interacting with Java applications when JRE 8 update 20 is installed.

9282

Release manager has been updated such that the memory claimed while preparing the release is freed up immediately after it has been written to file.

9216

The business logic that is used when applying a Blue Prism license key is updated restrict the use of the truncate statement unless it is necessary and available to the current SQL user.

9291

Auto-scrolling is provided when dragging items within a tree structure.

9112

The Tesseract engine is updated to correctly leverage the optionally specified language file.

8767

The ManagedSpy functionality is now fully available when interacting with applications presented using .NET 2.0.

7776

The environment themes are now applied to additional screens as well as the file menu button.

9307 9356

The Process MI form has been refreshed to improve usability when selecting multiple Runtime Resources.

9308


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Reference

The Get All Items action no longer presents a ReadAllTableItems error when interacting with some SAP Table controls. This action has been further extended to return all data from the table without requiring interaction with the scroll bar.

9281

On devices which are manually configured to log exceptions to a local file, the full stack trace is now preserved when Application Manager reports an error.

3990

The archiving utility is extended to archive completed sessions that were used for debugging (such as when manually stepping through a process).

9284

The issue is resolved whereby the /overwrite switch didn't complete successfully when using the command line utility to import a Business Object or Process

9283

A command line switch for AutomateC is provided to allow the Blue Prism connection to be specified inline (/dbconname).

9287

Minor updates have been made to the product help that display:

9288 9289 9342 9357

•

Advice relating to ensuring that the custom SQL Security Role is manually extended when adding custom tile Data Sources directly to the database.

•

Information about the /refreshdependencies switch

•

The correct page title for the content relating to exposing a Business Object or Process as a web service

•

Details about how to leverage language packs when using OCR

An issue is resolved whereby it was possible to log out of Blue Prism whilst there were still active windows open.

9313

An issue is resolved whereby the highlighted box had an opaque fill color when spying applications on Windows XP.

9280

The scheduler has been updated to address a scenario whereby the session is created but not start it and therefore the session remains in a pending state.

9368

The logic that is used to validate Business Objects and Processes that are being imported has been updated to cater for settings which have fractional values.

9331


Page 42 of 51


Reference

A number of changes have been introduced to the queues functionality: •

The queue management refresh button functionality has been improved.

•

The active queues auto-refresh functionality has been improved.

•

A null reference exception when loading active queues has been addressed

•

Resolved an error whereby in certain scenarios, the associated values in queue management were not correctly updated.

•

Resource pool members are no longer considered as available for use in active queues.

•

The control view titles now appropriately reflect the selected queue node.

9312 9314 9315 9317 9322 9323 9324 9349

The page menu option in the Tools menu of Process Studio now shows the correct icon.

9347

The Single Sign-on options presented under System are no longer present when using Blue Prism native authentication.

9293

The list of exposed Business Objects and Processes is now promptly refreshed when an item is concealed via the User Interface.

9339

The user interface headings for the list of consumed Web Services have been updated.

9218

The modify web service wizard now correctly allows the previously specified name to be reused.

8699

The data validation applied to web service input parameter values has been updated to allow for use of multi-byte characters.

9374

The information exchanged between the client and server when in a pre-authentication state has been reviewed and information that is no longer required has been removed.

9229

The process of setting machine name of Runtime Resources in the database following a reset is improved to address an issue where occasionally the machine name could be set to null which resulted in archiving or maintenance errors.

5687

The process of restoring a pending session following a Runtime Resource coming back online and presenting a Missing Runner error has been improved.

9303

The functionality which allows groups to be renamed has been improved to better handle the reorganization of the tree following the change.

9377

The filtering of Business Objects and Processes has been updated such that retired items are no longer displayed on the history page.

9327


Page 43 of 51

Visual Business Object updates A number of Visual Business Objects (VBOs) are provided within the Blue Prism release but changes are only applied when a specific VBO is explicitly imported. Any use of these VBOs should be re-verified following an import to ensure compatibility with any change of behaviour Email – POP3/SMTP Description of change

Reference

The Get Message action no longer returns an error when parsing the body of an email which does not contain a plain-text part.

9294

Additionally, a new input parameter is provided to indicate whether HTML is preferred, such that, if a HTML part is available it will be returned in place of a plain-text part. A new output parameter named Content-Type is provided to indicate the content-type of the returned body. (e.g. text/plain).

MS - Excel Description of change

Reference

An update has been made to address the error:

9351

"Insert" was failing with "failed to delete selection: Insert method of Range class failed".


Page 44 of 51

Version 5.0.5 – January 2016: Early Adopter release Database changes This release requires the Blue Prism database to be version 191 therefore a database upgrade will be required.

Enhancements A number of new features are introduced in this version of Blue Prism. Additional information is provided within the Blue Prism User Guide – v5 Feature Summary which is available on the user portal. []. Description of change Active Work Queues Active Queues are introduced to provide a queue-centric approach for dynamically controlling the number of Resources operating against a given queue at a particular time. •

Queues can be configured to be Active Queues with an associated process and group of Resources.

•

The number of Resources assigned to a given Active Queue is toggled within a new panel on the Control tab which additionally provides useful metrics.

•

Provides the ability to query IsStopRequested within a process execution to detect if a stop request has been received for a given session.

Built on .NET 4 Blue Prism v5.0 is built on .NET Framework 4 providing support for advanced users wishing to reference the latest .NET dlls, whilst maintaining the compatibility for installing the application on a wide range of modern and historical operating systems including Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP through to Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8.1 Control room filters A number of new changes have been introduced: •

The prominence of user-specific session management filters is increased within the Control tab.

•

The creation of global Queue management filters has been standardized.

Copy and paste for actions and pages Copy and Paste functionality is now provided for Business Object actions and Process pages providing accelerated development Copy Queue Items The ability to copy a queue time to be a different queue is provided, and includes the ability to modify key attributes of the item including tags, item status, priority and defer until information. Credential manager expansion A number of new features have been added to credential manager including: •

The ability to store optional data values such as an expiry date and whether the credential should be recognized as valid.

•

Custom attributes can be defined which provide the ability to store supplementary information that may be required when authenticating against a third party system.


Page 45 of 51

Description of change Dashboards Management dashboards are introduced to provide immediate visibility of the virtual workforce through visualization of key metrics. •

Dashboards comprise a series of configurable system or custom Tiles and are configured via a drag and drop interface.

•

They can be private or global, and users can select which dashboard will be displayed on the Home tab.

•

The type of chart to be used to display the data can be configured on a Tiles, the refresh interval can be configured and custom parameters can be set which will be passed to the underlying data source.

•

A series of system data sources are provided and help is provided for each.

•

Custom data sources with a prefix of DS_ which are manually added to the Blue Prism database will appear automatically for using within a Tile.

•

An automation data collation utility with configurable retention settings is provided to accumulate and process data for use within Tiles. Alternatively this can be configured to be triggered externally.

Dependency tracking Featured throughout the platform, dependency tracking provides an interactive view of how a given component is referenced. Applies to: Application models and elements; objects and actions; processes and pages; credentials; calendars; fonts; environment variables; web services; and work queues. Embedded OCR Initially available as an early access feature within v4.2, introduces OCR functionality for interpreting screen text and regions captured from scanned documents using Tesseract. Environment themes Provide the ability for an environment to be assigned a specific theme color to allow users to easily identify which environment they have accessed. Font recognition for joined characters Initially available as an early access feature within v4.2, provides support for interpreting joined characters for scenarios such as where natively two or more characters are presented as one. Additionally learnt characters can now be deleted. Global Application models Application models can now be referenced from multiple Business Objects allowing large applications be modelled centrally with a series of associated Business Objects. Latency Subject to appropriate process design, Runtime Resources (robots) can now be deployed in scenarios where the connection between the component and the Application Server is not low latency. Localization Blue Prism components can now be deployed onto devices configured for different locales allowing developers and controllers to work with their own locale settings.


Page 46 of 51

Description of change Logging Levels Session logging has been extended to provide Errors Only logging which ensures critical information about the workforce can still be captured, even where disk space is a premium. Includes logging levels: On, Off, Errors Only. Multi-tier grouping A hierarchical grouping mechanism provides flexibility for configuring how items are displayed within Blue Prism. They are particularly useful for organizing Processes, Objects and Resources within a user-friendly structure and features a new context menu that elevates a range of features. Additionally Ctrl + Drag allows a single item to be present within multiple groups where this is supported. Release manager Updates to Release Manager extend the items which can be ported between environments to include Groups, Dashboards and Tiles. Additionally when porting items which will dynamically include child objects, these are now more prominent. Dependency tracking can also be leveraged within Release manager. SQL Azure Initially available as an early access feature within v4.2, support is provided for deploying the Blue Prism database for pre-production environments on Microsoft SQL Azure. SQL AlwaysOn Availability Groups Initially available as an early access feature within v4.2, support for SQL AlwaysOn Availability Groups allows an Availability Group Listener to be selected as the provider hosting the Blue Prism database. SQL Server Roles The SQL access rights for users of the Blue Prism platform are commonly restricted to provide limited access. Blue Prism v5 leverages a small number of SQL features which are not natively available to reader roles and therefore specific SQL roles are introduced to allow SQL DBAs to easily grant the additionally required permissions to the appropriate users. Includes: •

bpa_ExecuteSP_DataSource_bpSystem: Provides execute privileges for the native stored procedures provided for use by dashboard tiles.

•

bpa_ExecuteSP_DataSource_custom: Provides execute privileges for the custom stored procedures that are imported via Blue Prism.

•

bpa_ExecuteSP_System: Provides execute privileges for system stored procedures such as those which enable verification of the Blue Prims version, and which carry out MI data processing.

Updated user interface The user interface has been refreshed across the product, providing new features and easier access to common functionality. It incorporates a redesign of the menu structure to provide an intuitive user experience, new context menu options and a new Action button in the top right of each of the main panes. Additionally it introduces a new Studio tab which provides a single point of access for developers to manage Business Objects and Processes and features a multi-tier hierarchical grouping structure to aid the organization of developed components. Object Studio and Process Studio have been refreshed with a sharpened canvas, re-positioned stage toolbox, updated shapes and increased options for zoom. Additionally drag-and-drop is provided from the toolbox.


Page 47 of 51

Description of change Unicode data storage The underlying platform is updated to support the processing and storage of Unicode data within the database to provide the capability to work with any character set and includes Unicode support for session logs although this option is disabled by default. Version history prominence The prominence of the version history for Business Objects and Processes has been increased within the user interface and the compare feature now be leveraged from an increased number of locations.


Page 48 of 51


Reference

Attachmate Reflections is now certified for HLLAPI interaction.

8622

Additional actions are provided for SAP thick-client interaction. This includes the ability to set focus to a declared field, and obtain the contents of a cell at a specified location.

8794 8917

A new environment function GetUserName() is provided within a Business Object or Process to retrieve the username of the user who is responsible for the Control Room session. When the session represents a Business Object or Process being consumed as a web service, it provides the username that was used to establish the connection with Blue Prism.

9154 9155

This also caters for Business Objects which are consumed using auto-initialization. Introduces the ability to use Global Send Keys on all Active Accessibility elements.

8757

Collections with field names which contain spaces, can now be used as input parameters for Business Objects and Processes which are exposed as a web service.

9190

The authentication process is improved when Business Objects or Processes exposed as web services are consumed when the environment is configured to use Microsoft Active Directory authentication for single sign-on. The user account must now also be a member of an Active Directory Group which is directly associated with a Blue Prism security role.

9148

The Create Database form now displays the name of the connection that will be affected if the action is initiated.

8936

A number of issues when using regional mode on a Windows 8.1 environment are resolved. This includes a scenario where the image may appear blank.

8428

Improved conflict management is provided to cater for where an object is being imported and there is a clash with a pre-existing process with the same name or id; or where a process is being imported and there is a clash with a pre-existing object with the same name or id.

8884

Provides a compatibility update to allow credentials to be defined when using SQL Azure.

8979

Updated syntax highlighting is provided when using the in-product expression editor.

9177

Resolves a primary key constraint on the BPAStatistics table for a subset of environments that upgraded to v4.2.47.

8858

The Get HTML Attribute read action has been updated to use the friendly name displayed within Application Modeller, rather than an internal reference, for the attribute name parameter.

8575

When Archiving is set to Automatic and the Mode is configured to Delete old logs permanently, log files are no longer exported to the archive folder.

8902

Applies the user name length restriction that is enforced when creating a user, to the Update User Name action.

8621

Exiting Object Studio or Process Studio after having only made changes to stage logging levels now prompts the user to save changes.

4238


Page 49 of 51


Reference

Queue filtering is improved to use local (rather than UTC) time for filtering and additionally no longer automatically includes the current day and minute when using a less than or equal to condition.

8154

Ensures that date/time values within the process and object history are configured to display the local time.

8560

Ensures that date/time values within the Audit Log viewer are presented in UTC format.

6147

When in debug mode, prevents subsequent stages from being skipped when the currently selected stage contains a breakpoint and the user clicks Go.

6426

Additional error handling when working with Active Accessibility is introduced along with additional diagnostics.

8915

Addresses an issue when accessing the Data Item Watch screen whereby users were presented with an unexpected error.

8679

The information written to the event viewer as a result of errors experienced writing to the local configuration file has been improved.

8925

A number of updates have been made to the in-product help regarding recommended system zoom settings.

7621 8316

The in-product help has been updated to confirm that tag masks perform a logical AND not OR.

8546


Page 50 of 51

Visual Business Object updates A number of Visual Business Objects (VBOs) are provided within the Blue Prism release but changes are only applied when a specific VBO is explicitly imported. Any use of these VBOs should be re-verified following an import to ensure compatibility with any change of behaviour Email – POP3/SMTP Description of change

Reference

A number of changes have been introduced including: •

The Send Message action has been updated to allow a single message to be sent to multiple recipients.

•

The Send Message action has been updated to optionally specify if the message body should be treated as HTML.

MS – Excel Description of change

Reference

A new action Run Macro is introduced to allow macros defined within the workbook to be executed. System – Active Directory Description of change

8440

Reference

A number of changes have been introduced including: •

The original User Exists action has been deprecated.

•

A new action has been added to support searching for any object within the domain based on its Common Name (CN): User Exists (Displayname)

•

A new action has been added to support searching for any object within the domain based on its User Principal Name (UPN): User Exists (UserPrincipalName)

•

A new action has been added to support searching for any object within the domain using a specified attribute name and value: Object Exists (Dynamic)

•

The information provided within the API help has been updated.


8948

Reference

The embedded documentation is updated to provide more information about the proper use of the Merge Collection action. Utility – File Management Description of change •

9168 9169

8582

Reference

The Get Files action within the VBO has been updated to return date/time properties in UTC format.


8857

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BluePrismReleaseNotes5.0.33

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