Managing unexpected pop-ups

Any window that is external to the target application is considered a pop-up. For example, if you are using the Google Chrome browser, a Microsoft Windows Update notification is considered a pop-up.

A pop-up window is detected by comparing the point or area of action window with the target application window. The detected window is marked as pop-up and handled if it is different from the target window.

System pop-ups such as anti-virus alerts, Windows update notifications, or notifications from other applications (such as Teams) might interrupt and even stop bot execution. With regular error handling logic, it can be difficult to block these pop-ups during bot runtime. Resilient automation can detect and triage these pop-ups to ensure a seamless bot execution.

SAP and HTML are the currently supported technologies.

The following diagram shows how a resilient and non-resilient bot handles pop-ups:Automation resiliency illustration

Supported packages

The handle unexpected pop-ups functionality is currently supported for the following packages:
  • Image Recognition (version 3.15.2 or later)
  • Mouse (version 2.14..0 or later)
  • OCR (version 2.12.1 or later)
  • Recorder (version 2.11.5 or later)
  • Screen (version 2.9.2 or later)

Limitations for handling pop-ups

The automation might fail if the system is unable to handle pop-ups in the following scenarios:
  • The pop-up is from an application that is running with administrator privileges.
    Note: As a workaround, you can run the automation with administrator privileges by selecting the Run with administrative privileges check box in the Run bot now window.
  • The pop-up application has any of the defensive programming such as pop-up should not be minimized or cannot change its z-order.
  • Commands cannot handle the pop-ups that contain one of the following options:
    • Currently active window - the window that is active when the bot run starts.
    • Desktop window - the default window or space behind all the open windows.

      This is the option that the automation developer will choose for capturing or performing actions over the windows desktop. For example, when you use any action from the Image Recognition package to capture an event, the Desktop or screen option will not work if there is an unexpected pop-up during execution.

    • Screen - the visible screen.

      This option is used when automation developer wants to initiate an action over the visible screen (current state of the developer's windows machine ).

  • The pop-up is part of a target application (browsers such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge). Few examples of target applications are:
    • A validation message.
    • The Restore tab option when Google Chrome restarts.
    • Update message for the Java version