UiPath Healing Agent: The Game-Changer for Dynamic UI Automation

What is UiPath Healing Agent?

UiPath Healing Agent is a powerful feature introduced in UiPath to address the challenges of broken selectors. It detects, repairs, and updates selectors automatically when a UI element changes. The feature reduces the need for manual intervention and ensures seamless execution of workflows.

UiPath Healing Agent provides two main benefits in this context:

1. Actionable Recommendations: When UI-based automation fails, Healing Agent suggests potential solutions such as updating selectors, adding smart delays in specific areas, or modifying workflows to handle unexpected scenarios like pop-ups or overlays.
2. Self-Healing Capability: The Healing Agent’s ability to recover from failures complements the Unified Target fallback approach. It applies intelligent recovery strategies to keep automation running smoothly, even in complex situations. This includes steps like adjusting selectors, closing interfering overlays, or adding delays for page loading.

Prerequisites

• Studio: Latest Community version (You can download it from here: https://cloud.uipath.com/)
• Robot: 24.10 or later
• UIAutomation.Activities Package: 24.12.3-preview
• Optionally, enable the VerifyExecution feature.

A Dynamic UI Challenge

In many automation scenarios, such as web scraping or form filling, the UI elements on the website are not static. For example, on the RPA Challenge website, the field names, button positions, or even the page layout may change based on user input, session data, or the content dynamically loaded on the page. This leads to selectors breaking and automation failures, requiring manual intervention.

RPA Challenge Wensite

This is where UiPath’s Healing Agent comes in. Healing Agent is designed to automatically adjust the selectors when the UI elements change dynamically, preventing automation failures. Instead of having to manually update or reconfigure the selectors each time a change occurs, the Healing Agent detects changes and heals the selectors by updating them based on available properties.

How the Healing Agent Works

The Healing Agent analyzes the dynamic behavior of UI elements and adapts the selectors accordingly. Here’s how it helped in my use case:

Dynamic Element Identification:

• The Healing Agent keeps track of the dynamic nature of elements, such as changing field names, positions, or visibility, and identifies the most reliable properties to construct selectors.

Automatic Healing:

• When the automation fails due to broken selectors, the Healing Agent steps in and modifies the selectors based on its real-time analysis, ensuring that the workflow can continue seamlessly without needing manual intervention.

Reduced Maintenance Efforts:

• Once the Healing Agent is enabled, the bot can self-heal itself whenever the UI changes. This greatly reduces the time and effort spent on maintenance and troubleshooting.

Enable the Healing Agent in UiPath Orchestrator

Go to the process or Job

• Once the process is selected, click on the ‘Edit’ button (represented by a pencil icon) to modify the process.
• In the process configuration screen, look for the ‘Healing Agent’ option.
• Toggle the ‘Enable Healing Agent’ switch to the ‘On’ position. This will activate the Healing Agent for the selected process.

Agent Healing

Practical Scenario

Imagine an automation workflow designed to interact with a “Field” on a web form. Due to dynamic Changing UI ,the selector for the filed changes, causing the automation to fail. UiPath Agent Healing steps in, analyzes the updated interface, and recommends a new selector. This update ensures the bot can locate the button and resume its process without requiring immediate developer intervention.

In the image above, we see an instance where Agent Healing provides recommendations after a failure:

• Original Selector: <webctrl aaname='Email' tag='LABEL' type='' class='' check:innerText='Email' />
• Recommended Selector: <webctrl aaname='Email' tag='LABEL' type='' class='' check:text='Email' />

The updated selector uses check:text='Email' instead of check:innerText='Email', reflecting a change in the application UI.

Benefits of Using the Healing Agent

• No Manual Selector Updates: Healing Agent automatically adapts to dynamic changes, eliminating the need for manual adjustments after every page load or UI update.
• Improved Stability: The automation becomes more resilient to UI changes, improving the reliability of the overall workflow.
• Efficiency Gains: With Healing Agent enabled, automation projects require less maintenance, saving valuable time for developers and ensuring faster deployment.
• Seamless Integration: Healing Agent works seamlessly with existing workflows without requiring significant changes, making it easy to integrate into ongoing automation projects.

Conclusion

UiPath Agent Healing is a powerful tool for maintaining the reliability of automation workflows. By proactively adapting to changes in target elements, it saves time, reduces manual effort, and ensures that automation processes run smoothly despite unforeseen challenges.

If you’re working with dynamic UIs and looking to enhance the resilience of your automation workflows, the Healing Agent is definitely a game-changer to consider.