Orchestrator - July 2023

26 July 2023

Upcoming changes to roles and permissions

We are constantly striving to make our roles as intuitive and self-contained as possible, so that you can more easily determine which one best fits your needs.

As such, this is what you can expect starting with August 21st in Community and August 28th in Enterprise:

The Automation User role will no longer have permission to publish packages, and will abide by its initial definition, namely a user with the minimum folder level permissions needed to execute processes. This is a governance best practice to ensure that personal user packages do not accidentally get published without first being reviewed.
You will have access to a new role, Automation Publisher, which is dedicated to proficient users who can publish their own packages.

24 July 2023

Webhooks in tenant search

Webhooks have been added to the list of entities that can be returned in the Search in tenant page.

Manual retries changes

Manual retries are not counted towards the maximum number of retries you set for queue items.

To align with this behavior, the following parameter changes have been applied when manual retries are performed from the API:

RetryNumber is now 0
AncestorId is now null

Queue item unique key

Individual queue items now get their own unique key upon retrial, whereas before they would inherit the parent's key.

This applies to both automatic and manual retries.

Credential store connection error

When the connection to the credential store which contains robot credentials is not established, thus preventing the password from being retrieved, the robot is no longer started, and you are now returned the following error:

Unable to retrieve credentials from {credential_store_name} credential store. Please check your connection settings and ensure the {credential_store_name} service is running.Unable to retrieve credentials from {credential_store_name} credential store. Please check your connection settings and ensure the {credential_store_name} service is running.

This prevents you from being locked out of the robot account due to repeated attempts to start the robot without credentials.

New transactions columns

We have added four new columns to the Transactions page (Queues > View Transactions):

Deadline (absolute)
Postpone (absolute)
Started (absolute)
Ended (absolute)

Note that they are not enabled by default, so make sure to select them from the Columns list.

These columns are also included in exported reports.

20 July 2023

Retention of recorded videos

We have changed our retention policy for recorded videos. Now, when you choose to record a job execution from the settings of its underlying process, the video is stored in Orchestrator as follows:

for 7 days in the case of failed jobs
for 3 days in the case of successful jobs

18 July 2023

Execution settings changes

We have added new settings to help you control when triggers are disabled following job failure. This is what you can now benefit from:

A new setting in the time trigger and queue trigger creation window, namely Set execution-based trigger disabling. When the toggle is enabled, you are presented with two options:
- Disable when consecutive job execution fail count – the trigger is disabled after the number of failed executions you choose for this setting.
- Grace period on disabling the trigger (days) – the number of days to wait before the trigger is disabled after the first failure of a job.
  Note:
  In case you're running a Serverless robot in a Community instance, the following execution values are automatically set, and cannot be edited:
  - Disable when consecutive job execution fail count - 10.
  - Grace period on disabling the trigger (days) - 0.
  This means the trigger will get disabled on the day when the job failed 10 consecutive times, to prevent the consumption of Robot Units from constantly trying to execute the job successfully.
Two new tenant-level execution settings aimed at connected event, time, and queue triggers (i.e. triggers created in Studio Web) automatically published to personal workspaces:
- Triggers - Connected triggers - Disable when job execution fail count - the trigger is disabled after the number of failed executions you choose for this setting.
- Triggers - Connected triggers - Grace period when job execution keeps failing count (days) - the number of days to wait before the trigger is disabled after the first failure of a job.
These do not apply to triggers published outside of personal workspaces.

Report exports improvements

We have streamlined the way data is exported from grids. These are the changes you can benefit from now:

When you click Export, you are no longer asked for confirmation. Instead, you are shown a notification letting you know that the export is in progress.

Once done, another notification is displayed, letting you know that the exported data is ready for download.

The download then starts automatically if you have the Alerts - View permission.

If you don't, you can download the exported data from the My Reports page.

11 July 2023

Renamed execution settings

Two tenant-level execution settings have been renamed, so as to help you find your way around with ease:

Triggers - Disable when failed count is now Triggers - Disable when job creation fail count
Triggers - Disable when it keeps failing count (days) is now Triggers - Grace period when job creation keeps failing count (days)

Internal package sorting

Internal packages, namely packages uploaded via Orchestrator-hosted feeds, are now sorted by published date. The published date is the date when the most recent version of a package was published.

Trigger execution changes

The recurrent execution of time triggers, queue triggers, and test schedules is now based on their creation time. While they were previously triggered at second 0 of every minute, they are now triggered at the same second as the one in their creation time.

This is how the change translates in cron expressions:

For a time trigger created at 12:23:34 with the cron expression 0 * * ? * * (i.e. set to run every minute), the next execution time will be at 12:24:34.
For a time trigger created at 12:23:34 with the cron expression 1 * * ? * * (i.e. set to run at 1 second past every minute), the next execution time will be at 12:24:01.

Permission checks for package downloads

Robots can now download packages from the tenant feed as long as they have the View on Packages permission.

Upcoming manual retries change

Manual retries are not counted towards the maximum number of retries you set for queue items.

To align with this behavior, the following parameter changes will be applied when manual retries are performed from the API:

RetryNumber will be 0
AncestorId will be null

This change is scheduled to happen in two weeks' time in Community and in a month's time in Enterprise.

Breaking change

Upcoming change to permission checks

Creating a queue trigger from the user interface requires Queues permissions. However, this enforcement is not currently in place for API-triggered actions. As such, within a month, we will also start checking for the Create on Queues permission when you try to create a queue trigger from the API. Please make sure that you meet this requirement before that time.

When can I see these changes?

The date when a change is first announced in the release notes is the date when it first becomes available.

If you don't see the change yet, you can expect to see it soon, after we roll out changes to all the regions.

More information

Deprecation timeline

We recommend that you regularly check the deprecation timeline for any updates regarding features that will be deprecated and removed.

July 2023