Specific Content Limitations in UiPath [RPA Developer’s Investigation]

The Great Disappearance

Recently, a significant change in UiPath impacted many workflows, including mine—the Specific Content feature disappeared. This really cool feature allows for easier access and management of relevant data within a queue in UiPath’s Orchestrator.

I initially didn’t realize this was the cause because it coincided with a widespread incident in UiPath across Europe in mid-March 2024, a communication mining outage in the EU region. At that time, I believed it affected my workflow, so the specific content from queue items was unavailable. However, a few days later, it became clear that the specific content was still missing, prompting me to investigate further.

After checking the UiPath forum, I found many people faced the same issue. When attempting to retrieve Specific Content from transactions after using the “Get queue items” activity, it would return the reference, but the specific content would always return as null. An UiPath employee responded in the forum, stating they would no longer support retrieving specific content from the “Get queue items” activity. This change was announced in December.

The rollout was slightly delayed but finally deployed to community tenants in mid-March. For enterprise tenants, this limitation will take effect in July 2024.

What Exactly Happened (And Will Happen)?

On December 15th, UiPath announced new rate limits, considered industry best practices for maintaining optimal performance levels, highly secure usage, and consistent service availability.

The benefits include:

• Ensuring a predictable system,
• Improving performance,
• Enhancing security,
• Ensuring fair usage.

Rate Limits:

The following endpoints will be limited to 100 API requests per minute for each tenant:

GET/odata/Jobs/?<filters>

GET/odata/QueueItems/?<filters>

Any requests exceeding this limit will receive an HTTP 429 response.

These limits do not apply to adding queue items and processing jobs. Adding a queue item, removing it from a queue, setting its status, or starting and processing any number of jobs has no impact.

What Also Will be Removed?

So far, many processes have used the ‘Get Queue Items’ activity, which contains valuable information that was used later in the process. Among other data, we could fetch information from Specific Content. Currently, we receive null.

Specific Content is not the only piece of data that has been deleted. The following fields will be removed from the Jobs and Queue Items GetAll endpoints:

GET/odata/Jobs:

• InputArguments,
• OutputArguments

GET/odata/QueueItems:

• SpecificContent,
• OutputData,
• Analytics Data

How do I Get Specific Content for a Queue Now?

List(1) { QueueItem { AssignedTo=null, DeferDate=null, DueDate=null, Id=XXXXXXXXX, ItemKey=[XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX], LastProcessingOn=”XX/XX/2024 XX:XX:XX”, Output=null, Priority=Normal, ProcessingException=null, Progress=null, QueueDefinitionId=XXXXXXXXX, QueueName=”X_Queue”, Reference=”XXXXXXXXX”, RetryNo=0, ReviewStatus=”None”, RowVersion=byte[8] { X, X, X, X, XX, XX, XX, XX }, SpecificContent=null, StartTransactionTime=[XX/XX/2024 XX:XX:XX], Status=Successful } }

The GetQueueItems activity

According to the changes, the SpecificContent is now always null. UiPath suggests using the GET/odata/QueueItems({key}) endpoint instead.

Initially, I was confused because when I tried to send a request using the ItemKey, I received an error.

It turns out that using the ID is necessary. I have added a loop to the dispatcher, which goes through all queue items, sends a GET request using the Id: “/odata/QueueItems(” + currentItem.Id.ToString() + “)”, and then deserializes the ‘JSON and reassigns the specific content to the queue item.

Final Thoughts

The change regarding the inability to receive Specific Content has impacted several processes I developed and maintained. I think such significant changes should be announced directly to the emails of Orchestrator admins. I only learned about the changes from a forum…

Of course, I understand that the news section in the documentation is binding, but sometimes we miss something, and sometimes we don’t have time to browse the documentation. The current solution, which involves sending a request for each item separately, has significantly lengthened the process, which I had to explain to clients.

I am not sure if UiPath Product team has thought it through. I get the reasons behind this decision, but it might have been solved in a different way.

Have you encountered similar problems with your processes?

What solutions have you applied?

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Dominik Put

UiPath-certified RPA developer with extensive experience in automating healthcare, customer service, and HR processes. His keen interest lies in Document Understanding and OCR technologies.

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