From the ground up, new architecture has been adopted to make the Designer more robust and reliable to enhance user experience in the development of robots. Users will experience faster workflow loading, avoid memory leak and thus enjoy the overall enhanced stability of the product.

Enhancements and New Features

Home Tab - Some new controls have been included to the menu bar for removing unused variables in workflow with one click, the log path can also be easily accessed. Information button shows a quick view of the current workflow. Finally, a survey option has been included to engage with the users for providing feedback on the application.

Execute Tab - The Debug button now has a timer function, which gives even greater control to the robot designer for troubleshooting workflows.

Breakpoint function previously available by right clicking the activity has now been moved to the menu bar for easy access.

New activity available - The download features button will now show a count of new features that are available for the Designer. The user can then click open the download features button and click on the updates tab, then click Latest updates’ checkbox to list all the newly available activities.

Missing activity validation - To prevent users from saving workflow with missing activities, an alert message has been enabled to intuitively help the developer to install missing actives before working or saving the workflow.

Additionally, this validation is also available for previous version of the workflow if loaded into the Designer canvas. Earlier this validation was only performed for the workflow which was launched with the Designer.

List version - Previously, if the user opens an older version of the workflow, makes changes and click save, it would overwrite the latest version of the workflow. Now the logic has been changed to prevent this. So, this action of the user would now automatically create an updated version for the latest workflow if the user intends to save changes to an older version of the workflow.

Load and Save - With the new architecture, users will be able to load any workflow, 2x faster. Functions like Open, List Version have been connected to the feature manager to identify activities. Save functionality has been completely re-designed to avoid save issues.

Support for on-demand save Sync, which uses built in Designer save logic and background save Async is available. By default, Sync option is enabled, which is handy for troubleshooting any issues in saving the workflow but the Async option will be less demanding to the Designer as the save routines will be handled by the Robility Save Service.

Quick navigation - By default has been disabled. This was done to improve the responsiveness of the Designer as it was consuming a lot of resources on the fly when the user was activating various sections of the workflow. The users can still activate the Quick navigation if they choose to, by accessing it from the view tab.

User Log - A new log model has been implemented to provide users with accurate information during robot execution. We have added workflow execution duration, removed character limitation on the Designer output console to make it more informative and user-friendly.

Pre-Loader - All background processing is captured and displayed in the Pre-Loader with appropriate information. Example: Feature manager now displays what gets downloaded. About Workflow has been added to provide users with current workflow information.

Under the Hood changes

Dll memory leak - Overall sluggishness of the Designer was identified due to memory leak because of unused Dlls being loaded into memory. This issue is resolved now, and all reference Dlls will not be loaded by SmartDesigner, so, loading time is considerably reduced, resulting in improved performance.

Missing Feature calls -Multiple calls were being made by the Designer when a workflow was opened to check for downloading the features used in the workflow and then again to check for missing features in the Designer. This was delaying loading the workflow into the Designer canvas. Now we have corrected the logic and just one call is made by the Designer to provide the missing features in the Designer thereby, reducing the time required to load the workflow.

Workflow Save - Intermittent workflow save issue which was casing DB null error has been rectified by changing the save routine.

Debug - A new workflow execution method has been introduced as an experimental feature to improve the overall stability of the Designer. The re-designed break point & debug options have a timer functionality for faster troubleshooting of issues during robot development.

 Known Issues

 If delay activity is used at the end of the workflow, then Abort function will not work. To exit the loop you will have close and re-open the designer.