Version 11.3.5.2 Release Notes

Review the new features, changed features, fixed features, security fixes, and known limitations in Version 11.3.5.2 for Automation Anywhere Control Room, Enterprise Client, and Bot Insight.

Important: Before you install the Version 11.3.5.2 patch over the Version 11.3.5.1 patch, you must perform some additional steps in Version 11.3.5.1 to prevent existing active schedules from disappearing from your system. See Scheduled bots disappear after upgrading Control Room to 11.3.5.1 (A-People login required) | 11.3.5.1 Control Room upgrade section.

If you have already performed these steps when installing Version 11.3.5.1, you can proceed with the Version 11.3.5.2 installation.

New features

Control Room
Configure external key vault

You can now configure an external key vault in the Control Room. When the connection is established with the external key vault, you can configure the credential identifier details for the database, SMTP, Active Directory, and auto-login for retrieval from the configured external key vault.

Configure external key vault

Enterprise Client
Configure external key vault for auto-login

You can now configure an external key vault (CyberArk) to store the user's Windows login credentials to automatically log in to the Enterprise Client to run unattended automations.

To use the external key vault, you must have installed Version 11.3.5.2 for both Control Room and Enterprise Client.

Configure external key vault for auto-login | Enterprise 11: Auto Login

Bot Insight
Configure the time zone ((Zendesk ID: 203374 and Service Cloud case ID: 00179322, 00557728, 00543960, 00621135)

You can now change the default time zone setting to your preferred time zone. To set up a new time zone, configure the setting in the zoomdata.properties file. When the new time zone is configured, the changes are displayed on the Operation, Business, and COE dashboards.

Configuring the time zone

Changed features

Control Room
New Unknown status for Work Item (Service Cloud case ID: 00648847, 00672053)

When the Control Room restarts, Work Items that are in Active state are now changed to Unknown state. You can mark these unknown Work Items as complete or ready to run, or you can delete the unknown Work Items.
Enterprise Client
Enhancement to AANotification.exe (Zendesk ID: 148689, 168781, 185554, 239754, 240503, and Service Cloud case ID: 00320731, 00320738, 00676322, 00717929, 00729446)

In a Bot Runner machine, after completion of each task the Automation Anywhere icon now disappears from the taskbar. Previously, the Automation Anywhere icon remained visible for a long time even after closing the executable (.exe) file.
Bot Insight
Enhancement to DateTime system variables

The DateTime system variable now includes more options for the Date format. The Bot Insight administrator can now log in to the Enterprise Client and use the new options for the Date format from the drop-down menu to set the current date of the system.

Fixed features

Control Room
Service Cloud case ID Description
00604613, 00638852, 00650506, 00664805, 00664060, 00684172 Bot Runner devices are now connected to the Control Room with the proper status and without restarting the services on the nodes. Previously, because of a prolonged increase in workload management load, nodes were unresponsive and devices were disconnected.
00534562 Work Items that are inserted in the queue are now deployed immediately. They no longer remain in the queue even when a large size bot is deployed.
00640664 If Bot Runners fail to deploy Work Items in one queue, it no longer affects the deployment of the Work Items in the other queues. Previously, failure to deploy in one queue delayed and stopped the deployment of Work Items in other queues.
00619638 When you insert multiple Work Items in a queue one after the other, only one deployment is now triggered on a device at a time. Previously, multiple deployments were triggered at a time, resulting in more disk space usage on the Enterprise Client machine.
00538076 When you pause an automation and edit a Work Item, the edited Work Item no longer remains staged and is now successfully processed when the automation is resumed.
00682206 Historical data is now updated correctly in the Control Room database. Previously, the data was not updated due to an invalid access token in the Enterprise Client service memory.
00651130 When you export schedules from the Control Room, all the device names are now displayed correctly in the exported CSV file. Previously, some device names were not displayed correctly and the CSV file contained incomplete information.
00641901 Bot Runner devices are now connected to the Control Room with the proper status and without restarting the services on the nodes. Previously, because of an unusual increase in Apache Ignite memory, nodes were unresponsive and devices were disconnected.
00673299, 00672802, 00678423 When you install the Version 11.3.5.2 patch over the Version 11.3.5, existing active schedules no longer disappear.
00689357 You can now delete Work Items in a queue that are in Ready to run state.
00616038, 00676171, 00671712 You no longer encounter an issue when you install IQ Bot and the Control Room, restart the Automation Anywhere Control Room Service, and then open the IQ Bot URL. Previously, an error occurred when the user tried to access the IQ Bot URL.
Enterprise Client
Service Cloud case ID Description
00612939 In the Database command, when you use Excel as a database, the player now executes the task properly in the AWS Workspace environment. Previously, the player failed to execute the task.
00636262 The PDF Merge command no longer increases the Appdata-Temp file size when each bot is executed. All the temp files created at the time of merging multiple PDF documents are now deleted and so users do not have to manually delete these temp files.
00596112 When the WebSocket connection from the Bot Runner device to Control Room is lost, the workload management WebSocket connection is now reestablished and the device does not remain in a busy state. As a result, the Control Room can now find a device for the next deployment.
00601420 In the Email Automation command, the player now executes properly when the email data is retrieved using the IMAP server option. The player now retries for the finite number of times configured in the AA.Settings.xml file and displays a correct error message if it fails. Previously, the player was stuck intermittently at the End loop in the Email Automation command.
00658267 You can now use the Object Cloning command to perform web site operations on the Chrome browser. The player is no longer stuck intermittently when it receives a timeout response from the Chrome browser agent and now displays an error. However, the player terminates the execution if error handling is not used; if error handling is used, the error in it is captured. Previously, if the Chrome browser agent was not found, the player was stuck intermittently even after it received a timeout response from the browser.
00506141 When you use a Citrix driver for Enterprise Client to perform automation on XenApp through Automation Anywhere remote agent for Citrix and if the Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) channel is disconnected, a new ICA channel is now started to perform Object Cloning. Previously, if the ICA channel was not connected, the command failed to execute.
00626737, 00628726, 00638059 You can now capture the ComboBox control from an application or browser using the Object Cloning command. Previously, the ComboBox control was not captured. This issue occurred if you upgraded to JRE 261 patch.
00562780 A TYPE_014 error occurs during bot execution when you use the Get property option in the Object Cloning command with HTML technology in Chrome browser and the extracted object includes a special character. Set the value as true for allowspecialcharacters in the AA.settings file. As a result, the player then extracts the HTML InnerText property of the object.
00679838, 00674065 Bots deployed on a Windows terminal server using RDP deployment now run successfully and do not display a black screen on execution. Previously, the bots captured incorrect screenshots during execution, displaying a black screen due to intermittent RDP connection issues.
00542079 When you create a bot using the OCR command with the Capture Area option to process multiple images (500+), the bot now executes completely without any disruption. Previously, the bot failed to execute because the player failed intermittently after a certain number of images were processed.
00669785 When you use wildcard characters in the window title of the Object Cloning command and export the atmx task to xml, the wildcard character now appears in the <Window_Title> property of the object.
00656145, 00658901 The bot status is now displayed correctly in the Control Room. Previously, the bot status was randomly shown as unknown due to an access token issue during WebSocket reconnection.
00670888 Bots scheduled from the Control Room now execute successfully on the Bot Runner machine. Previously, execution of the bots failed occasionally because the Enterprise Client did not receive the deployment message from the Control Room due to a WebSocket connection issue.

You can set the required value for the following in the AAClientService.exe.config file located in the Enterprise Client installation path:

  • WebSocketMessageIdleTimeOutInSeconds. You can add a minimum value of 1 and maximum value of integer maximum, the default value is 30.
  • FailOverRetryTimeIntervalInSeconds. You can add a minimum value of 1 and maximum value of integer maximum, the default value is 60.
Bot Insight
Service Cloud case ID Description
00652335 The data in the BI run_data table for the date attribute is now stored correctly. You can now view and publish the Bot Insight dashboards. Previously, if there were changes in the date format in the BI run_data table and when the bots were executed, the data was not stored correctly. As a result, the dashboards did not render properly.
00707752 00697289,00697242 The COE and Business dashboards are now created correctly and display the data properly for Chinese locale. Previously, if you installed Automation Anywhere Control Room with Oracle Database for Chinese locale, the dashboards failed to render due to an issue with the date format in the Zoomdata datasource.

Security fixes

Control Room
Service Cloud case ID Description
00547169 Added functionality to support a corner case where audit logs were truncated during disaster recovery (DR) failover.
00538480 Added field-level encryption within TLS connections for passwords.
00645605 Updated Elasticsearch Open Distro from version 1.4 to 1.9 for security updates.
Enterprise Client
Service Cloud case ID Description
00654818, 00661080 Expanded available ciphers to include lower security ciphers for TLS/SSL to support older terminal emulator software.
Bot Insight
Service Cloud case ID Description
-- Fixed an API permission issue on dashboards that allowed a user to view admin panels within the Control Room.
-- Library: Scala Zoomdata uses port 3000. Use this port for internal communications only and do not expose the port for public access.

Known limitations

Control Room
When you configure the external key vault in the Control Room for auto-login (Client Application > Auto login), if you enter an invalid safe name, you do not receive any validation message prompting you to enter the correct safe name. After settings changes, auto-login fails due to the invalid safe name.

Enter a valid safe name when you set up the external key vault settings for auto-login.
When upgrading the Control Room to Version 11.3.5.2, you might experience a downtime. To avoid this downtime, before you start the upgrade, pause all the workload management queues and ensure that are no Work Items in progress.

Enterprise 11 upgrade considerations

You cannot uninstall the Version 11.3.5.2 patch when it is applied over Version 11.3.5 or Version 11.3.5.1.
If your Control Room is integrated in single sign-on mode with Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), the logout feature currently displays an error.
When the Control Room is installed with HTTPS, you might encounter an issue when you log in to the Enterprise Client.

Workaround:

  1. Stop the Automation Anywhere Control Room Reverse Proxy service on the primary Control Room node.
  2. Go to the Control Room installation folder and open the traefik.toml file located in the traefik folder.

    Example: C:\Program Files\Automation Anywhere\Enterprise\traefik\traefik.toml

  3. Add the following parameters in the CipherSuites section:

    "TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA",

    "TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA"

    If you have a cluster-based setup, repeat these steps on the other nodes.

  4. Restart the Automation Anywhere Control Room Reverse Proxy service on each Control Room server node after an interval of 10 seconds.
On Version 11.3.5.1 or Version 11.3.5.2, the Variable operation might take a longer time to process, as compared to previous versions.

Workaround:

  1. Log in to the Control Room.
  2. Navigate to Administration > Settings > Client application and select the Edit option.
  3. Enable Decimal configuration.
  4. Click Save changes.
Enterprise Client
For the Object Cloning command, when you capture an object and choose the Select Item By Text action, the list item might not display in the Item to be selected field. This occurs if you have configured JRE settings and upgraded to JRE 261 patch.

Workaround: Either use a variable or manually enter the item name in the Item to be selected field.
In a terminal server (multi-user) environment, when a user is logged in, the current user configuration is saved in the Enterprise Client service memory. If the Control Room administrator makes configuration changes after this is saved, any subsequent user login retrieves the new value from the Control Room, overriding the existing information in the Enterprise Client service memory. This impacts the initial user session and might require a relogin because of the configuration change in the Control Room.