TAP Release Notes 21.12

Tailent Automation Platform v21.12 offers RPA users and developers a wider arsenal of tools at their disposal, for automating and integrating even more applications and systems. We have added prebuilt actions for interacting with PDF documents and SQL database systems. Other features and improvements offer stability and performance enhancements for a more streamlined experience.

New features

PDF Actions

TAP Studio now offers support for interacting with PDF documents directly, without any third party requirements:

  • Reading content directly from electronic PDF files

  • Reading sections for efficiently scraping PDF data sources with multiple entries, such as tables

  • Reading page count for extracting page count from PDF documents

SQL Actions

We have added support for working with relational database systems directly through prebuilt TAP Studio actions:

  • Connect to database instance, with secure credential storage and connection string support for more advanced developers

  • Disconnect from database instances for efficient resource usage

  • Database Query for issuing custom SQL queries against the target RDBS instance

  • Database Non Query for using specific SQL queries

Dynamic Control Identifiers

With Dynamic Control Identifiers, RPA users can create more flexible UI control definitions. This allows them to reference dynamic controls at run-time, which can adapt to any conditions. This is done through a dedicated TAP Studio action which offers full support for variable and C# expressions.

Improved HTTP REST Request action

The HTTP REST Request action has received a major update and now offers full support for additional POST messages and authentication. A cookie persistence system has also been implemented, allowing multiple REST requests to share a common set of cookies across an automation context. This is particularly valuable for web APIs that feature some sort of cookie authentication/authorization mechanisms.

The HTTP REST Request action also feature multiple ease of use improvements as it is now easier than ever to build header and parameters for each request, all with a dedicated editing pane that offers full support for variables and expressions:

Other Improvements and actions

  • Word Page Count action for retrieving page count from Word (.docx) files. This action does not have any third party application requirements and can function without any Microsoft Office products installed on the target system.

  • Added Drag and Drop support for mouse interaction actions, through two new button states.

  • Added Tailent.Console scripting utility, which allows developers to write information to the debug console, directly from C# Scripts. Until now, the only way to extract information was to either display it using message boxes or by writing to files.

  • Added support for HTML Agility Pack for C# scripting; this allows users to quickly and efficiently utilize this open-source third party library for parsing HTML DOM content and is an invaluable enhancement along the dedicated Chrome extension.

  • Added a new feature where TAP Studio checks to see if the automation solution has been created with a newer version that the one running, in order to ensure solution consistency.

Resolved Issues

This release of TAP Studio comes with many fixes and corrections:

  • Bug #381 - Fixed an issue where some Windows regional settings would partially corrupt some automation solutions.

  • Bug #382 - Fixed an issue where the debug console would not display the correct action label name when finishing execution for that particular action.

  • Bug #385 - Fixed issue where solutions created with a particular set of older TAP Studio versions would cause TAP Studio to crash.

  • Bug #396 - Various improvements and bug fixes to the pipe communication channel between the native Chrome extension application and TAP workflow engine. These improvements fix a number of communication issues for Chrome automations and offer support to read/write to larger sized DOMs.

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