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Kofax RPA Limitations

The following section describes some limitations of the Kofax RPA product.

General

When collecting a large number of data elements, we recommend you to structure your robot for a divide-and-conquer approach, so that each run of the robot collects only a portion of the data elements.

Browser

  • The web pages downloaded using Make Snapshot are a representation of the content and styles downloaded from the internal browser in Kofax RPA. When viewing the downloaded pages in a desktop browser, they may render differently from viewing the original web page in that browser.

Excel

  • When looping over a global Excel variable, certain steps are not allowed inside the loop, that is after the loop step. This is dynamically enforced, in other words the error does not occur until the steps are executed. The following steps will always refuse to work on a global variable that the robot loops over inside the loop: Insert Rows, Insert Columns, Remove Rows, Remove Columns and Set Sheet Name.

  • Excel modification is memory intensive and might not work on large Excel documents. The limit may depend on many factors, for example, available memory on a design platform or a server platform, how many modifications the robot does, and so on. Therefore it is not possible to give precise criteria for when an Excel document is too large for Kofax RPA to handle.

  • Formats specified in the built-in Excel may not be displayed in the same way as in Microsoft Excel due to the use of Apache POI.

  • Formula support. See the Apache POI website for details on formula support in Excel.

  • Supported functions. See Features and functions and the Apache POI website for details on supported functions and function limitations.

  • Unsupported features

    • Manipulating array/table formulas (In Excel, formulas that look like "{=...}" as opposed to "=...")

    • Region operators: union, intersection

    • Parsing of previously uncalled add-in functions

    • Preservation of whitespace in formulas (when POI manipulates them)

    • Font changes, for example bold, size, etc.

    • Background color in cell

    • External file references from formulas

    • Excluding hidden values

    • Converting strings to a date with the FLOOR, HOUR, and MINUTE functions. Only decimal values are supported.

  • Sometimes, when your robot performs some actions on a very large Excel document, the processing may become slow after several hundred iterations. To speed up the process, use the following settings in your robot for Excel processing:

    • Use Global variable

    • Do not use the Ignore and Continue error handling

    • Do not run your robot in Design mode

      CAUTION:

      With all the above-mentioned conditions, if an error occurs when working with Excel, the variable value is set to empty. You will need to inspect your robot to make sure you use the supported Excel capabilities and correct the error to have a valid value in your variable.

See Features and functions for more information. See also Excel compatibility and limitations.

Execution Mode

The following list contains steps that are not available in the Smart Re-execution mode.

  • Clear Web Storage

  • Divide Text

  • Extract Image

  • Hide Tag

  • Insert Tag

  • Make Snapshot

  • Normalize Table

  • Remove Table Rows

  • Remove Tag Range

  • Replace Tag

  • Rewrite Page

  • Rewrite Style Sheet

  • Transpose Table

  • Unhide Tag

Kofax RPA Kapplets

The following list contains features that are not available in Kofax RPA Kapplets.

  • Adding OAuth robots to Kapplets

Using Kapplets with robots containing big volume data output is not recommended.

Date Converters

  • When the year is entered with two digits, the century cut-off of 2029 is used.

    Example

    09/10/30 becomes 1930-09-10 00:00:00.0

    09/10/29 becomes 2029-09-10 00:00:00.0

  • The day in a date is validated only if it amounts to 32 or over. When under 32, the day is converted to a corresponding day in the following month.

    Example

    2020-02-30 becomes 2020-03-01

    2020-02-31 becomes 2020-03-02

    2020-02-32 leads to error

Robot documentation

The following list contains features that are not available in the robot documentation.

  • Information on Connectors used by the robot is not included in the robot documentation.

JavaScript

There are lots of modern JavaScript constructions, where applying polyfills does not resolve an error. The following list contains JavaScript known issues.

  • The let statement

    CMAScript 2015 (6th Edition, ECMA-262)

  • Constants

    CMAScript 2015 (6th Edition, ECMA-262)

  • An arrow function expression () => {}

    CMAScript 2015 (6th Edition, ECMA-262)

  • Default function parameters

    CMAScript 2015 (6th Edition, ECMA-262)

  • for...of statement

    ECMAScript 2015 (6th Edition, ECMA-262)

  • Rest parameters

    ECMAScript 2015 (6th Edition, ECMA-262)

  • Method definitions 

    var obj = {
          property( parameters… ) {},
          *generator( parameters… ) {},
          async property( parameters… ) {},
          async* generator( parameters… ) {},

          // with computed keys:
          [property]( parameters… ) {},
          *[generator]( parameters… ) {},
          async [property]( parameters… ) {},

          // compare getter/setter syntax:
          get property() {},
          set property(value) {}
        };

    ECMAScript 2015 (6th Edition, ECMA-262)

    ECMAScript 2016 (ECMA-262)

  • Fetch API 

    fetch('http://example.com/movies.json')
          .then(function(response) {
            return response.json();
          })
          .then(function(myJson) {
            console.log(JSON.stringify(myJson));
          });

  • The Request interface of the Fetch API represents a resource request 

    var a = new Request(url);