Power Automate for desktop - Build 2204.1

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This article describes the new features, improvements and fixes to existing functionality that are included in this build.

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Version 2.19.139.22098 updates

New Features

  • Power Automate for desktop users will now have example desktop flows available for execution in their desktop app console, so that they can easily start familiarizing themselves with the product and get value without building complex flows from scratch. 
  • Power Automate for desktop users, belonging to more than one cloud or region, will now have the ability to choose the region they want to connect to, during sign in, provided that the respective registry key is adjusted accordingly.
  • UI automation in Power Automate for desktop is enhanced with a new action, 'Hover mouse over UI element in window'. This action imitates the user step of hovering the mouse pointer over a UI element in a window. 
  • The action 'Populate text field on web page' is enhanced with an extra parameter, with the name 'Populate text sending physical keystrokes'. When enabled, Power Automate for desktop populates the text field by imitating the user's keystrokes on a keyboard. Physical keystrokes are required for cases where sending the text through Javascript doesn't perform the intentional action on the text field.  
  • Tracking elements during recording will now be faster and more accurate, improving the recorder's performance accordingly. As a tradeoff, the action ‘Drag and drop UI element in window’ can’t be generated anymore by the recorder.

Enhancements & Improvements

  • Apart from just enabling or disabling the organization/tenant picker, users can now use more values for the same registry key to enable automatic connection to an organization via a specified list.
  • The button ‘On error’ in action modals has been visually improved to become more accessible.
  • When selecting the option ‘Password’ for the ‘Input type’ parameter of the ‘Display input dialog’ action, the produced variable that holds the user’s input is now automatically marked as sensitive.
  • This version introduces a desktop and a web icon in the UI element picker highlighter and recorder, to easily distinguish the highlighted elements’ types.
  • Friendly names are now used for web elements that have been captured manually in the UI elements pane, as well as during highlighting.

Repaired Functionality

The following list details issues in Power Automate for desktop that are now resolved:

  • An issue was fixed which was preventing users from logging in with the message ‘The given key was not present in the dictionary’.
  • An adjustment was implemented in the console, to fetch and show more than the original maximum of 5000 desktop flows – any more than that were initially only available in the portal.
  • Power Automate for desktop can now be launched with elevated rights by more than one Windows users.
  • This version of Power Automate auto-detects and uses the Windows proxy settings as expected, resolving the corresponding connection error that was introduced in version 2.18.
  • The actions pane can no longer be accessed via the menu option ‘View > Default layout’, while the flow is running.
  • In the actions that include direct password/encrypted input fields, changing the selected mode without providing any input does not directly mark the field as erroneous anymore.
  • While the ‘Get started’ walkthrough is running, the designer’s shortcut keys are not active anymore.
  • After the execution of a flow in the designer, renaming a variable (whether sensitive or not) does not clear its value anymore.
  • When an entire collapsed block of actions is copied, pasting it (when no action is selected) now takes place after the collapsed block as expected and not within it.
  • When using and saving the action ‘Extract data from web page’, an issue was fixed that was bringing all the flow designers to the foreground, in case more than one were open at the same time.
  • Disabling and re-enabling an action, which produces a variable that has been marked as sensitive, no longer resets the variable’s sensitivity.
  • An issue was fixed on presenting the cell values of a datatable variable in the variable viewer, which was not working properly when the names of its columns had a date format.
  • An error was fixed, which occurred when trying to select an image for an image recognition action, which had been copied over from another flow along with an image, whose name already existed in the target flow.
  • The actions ‘If window’ and ‘Wait for window’ now properly fetch the variable names in the dropdown menu of the ‘Window instance’ parameter, when referencing a window by its instance/handle.
  • In the actions ‘If window’ and ‘Wait for window’, upon selecting to get the window by title and/or class, the ‘Select window’ button that was missing from the previous version has now been restored.
  • This version, in contrast to the previous one, allows pasting actions from older versions, which are not associated with UI elements or images, so long as their schema has not changed in the meantime.
  • The recorder now properly captures the right click context menu in Windows 10.
  • While editing the action ‘Extract data from web page’, navigating to a web page in a browser where the web extension is not installed/enabled now leads to a more graceful error with the proper actionable message.
  • An issue was fixed in web automation during runtime, when trying to interact with SVG images.
  • The desktop recorder now works as expected with the app SAP GUI 770.
  • An issue with the action ‘Wait for window content’, which was throwing an error when a UI element was added, has been fixed.
  • Wait actions related to windows do not bring constantly anymore the window to the foreground while waiting.
  • The ‘Extract data from web page’ action is now properly added in the recorder window, when an entire HTML table is being extracted.

Other Announcements

  • Process advisor users should refrain from using the latest version of Power Automate for desktop, as the recorder does not produce the action ‘Drag and drop UI element in window’.

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