"Breaking compatibility without breaking it" for WebAPI with the new ConsoleX (v20.3+)

Shared by Oren

With the release of ConsoleX, as you all know and anticipating, we are moving from IIS to Nginx.

This move include both the Console itself and our Web API (Add Task).

The purpose of this post is to share knowledge on how we are going to “break” the compatibility together with providing instructions how to “fix the break” to allow customers the time to adjust to the new change.

I recommend that when preparing the 20.3 upgrade plan – to map which customers are using WebAPI and communicate this change is coming.

The documentation of all of this is still very rough, so keep that in mind.

So what has been broken:

1. We dropped the support for repeats for Add Task. That means that each call to Add task will create only one task. No more option to create multiple tasks with one call. (This change should not be new to you, as Itay discussed it with some of you several months ago, we did not take this decision by ourselves).

How will it not break:

We are providing two interfaces: one with the old interface with this field, and the value passed in it is ignored (always 1), and a new interface without this field.

2. The API path was changed.

it used to be: http://: API Port>/task/add

Now it will be http://: port>/webapi/task/add

To “unbreak” this, we will provide instructions to manually open in nginx another dedicated port that will work “the old way”.

(Attached is a draft document with instructions).

We don’t want to add this in the installation to all customers installation as it will cause a new port to be opened in nginx, and we don’t want that.

By default – the RPA server installation will have only the new interface through the new path.

If the old Conole is selected in the RPA installation, all the old WebAPI interface is installed in the same way as it used to be.