Update - August 20th (17.4.1 now available)

Hello, RPA Community,

Thanks again for your patience while we got the Google Chrome issues fixed in the latest release. Nintex Bot 17.4.1 is now available -- I strongly encourage you to install this version as soon as possible, and not only if you're targeting Chrome in your botflows.  You do NOT need to update RPA Central as long as you updated it last week.

Note that we released a new Chrome Extension today as well -- 1.2.0.0. The combination of 17.4.1 and the new Chrome extension should greatly improve the speed and reliability when designing or running botflows that target Chrome.

Thanks again,

Mike

Product Manager - RPA

Update - August 16th

Hi again, Everyone,

We are planning on releasing 17.4.1 mid-week. Thanks again for your patience as we work through the targeting issues with Chrome and Edge. For a little more detail, some of these changes that caused the instability in our web table targeting were to support what we internally call Shadow DOM, a construct in some web pages that have additional, hidden web pages behind what you actually see. These enhancements are being removed from 17.4.1 and the Chrome extension as they caused unforeseen problems targeting standard web tables. We will continue to enhance and refine our targeting to support Shadow DOM in the future, but for those who were waiting for this enhancement, please open a Nintex Support case so you can continue building botflows that interact with these types of web pages.

Thanks,

Mike

Update - August 13th

Hi, Everyone,

Quick update: We are not able to release 17.4.1 this week due to some additional testing that is necessary to make sure the edge cases are properly handled. Expect to hear from me early next week again to give you an update and potentially a download link.

We updated the release notes today with the latest information and we did release a new version of the Chrome extension, so please use that with 17.4.0. If you have any questions please post here in the forum. If you're stuck and can't run botflows, please file a support ticket.

Thank you again for your patience,

Mike

Product Manager - RPA

Update - August 12th

Hi, RPA Community,

I wanted to give you a quick update on where we're at with some of the Google Chrome/Microsoft Edge issues that I outlined in my forum post yesterday. We were hoping to get 17.4.1 out this week but have identified some edge cases that do not work, so we're taking some time tomorrow and over the weekend to fix and test these specific scenarios.

If you've upgraded to the latest release, you can still run your existing botflows and design botflows that don't target Chrome/Edge at the moment while we get you a new release. I'll post here when that's available next week and we'll also update the Release Notes.

For those more technically-minded folks, we've rearchitected the way our various processes talk to each other due to some past communication problems. The Nintex Bot service runs as a system server that starts an RPAStarter process for each user on the machine. This RPAStarter is responsible for getting jobs from RPA Central and then starting the Nintex Bot process (Foxtrot.exe) to run a botflow. From that point forward as long as Nintex Bot is running, it communicates with RPA Central. All of this communication that's on the box, so to speak -- and by that I mean the various processes talking to each other, not the communication with RPA Central -- happens with a client/server model built into Windows. This is what has been redesigned to allow for more robust and reliable comms starting in 17.4.0 and continuing in releases to come. It's also how RPA talks to the Foxtrot64 process for working with 64-bit apps and is used for our Chrome Extension. This last piece is where some corner cases have cropped up in 17.4.0 which we've identified and are addressing in 17.4.1. Microsoft Edge, built on Google Chromium, uses the same Chrome Extension which is why both browsers are affected.

Thanks for listening and thank you for your patience as we work through these issues. I'll keep you updated.

Mike

Product Manager - Nintex RPA