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Challenges with Power Automate Desktop in Unattended Mode

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Posted on by MarinaShalneva

Hello everyone,

I'm currently facing some challenges with Power Automate Desktop in Unattended mode. My workflow involves interactions with a web application, executing multiple actions within it. Originally developed in Attended mode, the flow runs smoothly and completes all necessary tasks. However, a couple of issues have emerged upon transitioning to Unattended mode. Firstly, Power Automate Desktop struggles to gain control of the Chrome browser. Despite attempting to resolve this by reinstalling the browser extension and restarting the VM, the problem persists intermittently. Another concern is the failure of various actions within the Unattended mode. Interestingly, no such issues arise when I run and debug the flow in Attended mode.

I'm curious to know if anyone else has encountered similar inconsistencies between Attended and Unattended modes. If so, how did you address these issues to ensure stability in Unattended mode? Your insights and advice on this matter would be immensely valuable to me. Thank you in advance for your help.

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Highboy 1,183 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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Well, we always use some time going from debug mode to unattended mode, even tho our developer server and production servers are 100% identically with hardware and software.
There can be timing issues, getting ui's and so on.
Don't know why, but it always happens.

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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As to launching the browser, I would suggest using a different approach, where you launch it via Run application and then attach it. This is foul-proof approach that has worked for me for years now, while the normal Launch new Chrome action does tend to fail when the extension does not load in time. Feel free to copy these actions for my standard LaunchBrowser sub-flow:

SET URL TO $'''SetSomeURLHere''' System.RunApplication.RunApplication ApplicationPath: $'''chrome''' CommandLineArguments: $'''www.google.com''' WorkingDirectory: '' WindowStyle: System.ProcessWindowStyle.Maximized ProcessId=> AppProcessId WAIT (UIAutomation.WaitForWindow.ToOpenByTitleClass Title: $'''Google*''' Class: $'''Chrome_WidgetWin_1''' FocusWindow: True) FOR 30 WebAutomation.LaunchChrome.AttachToChromeByTitle TabTitle: $'''Google''' AttachTimeout: 5 BrowserInstance=> BrowserMain ON ERROR REPEAT 5 TIMES WAIT 3 END WebAutomation.GoToWebPage.GoToWebPageCloseDialog BrowserInstance: BrowserMain Url: URL

As to some UI actions failing, I would always suggest having a Take screenshot action called on error whenever you use UI automation in unattended mode. It helps debugging any possible issues. You can put it into a sub-flow and call that sub-flow from an On block error action. Also, I would suggest using Get last error, too, and logging the error. This way you will at least be able to figure out what's wrong and make appropriate changes.

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OkanMTL 703 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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We had a lot of problems at the start between attended and unattended.

The solution was pretty simple, yet hard to find. Our screen resolution settings (the default) on our machine where we run unattended flows, was not set to True.

Check step 2 of the docs

Maybe you guys have set it to False?

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MarinaShalneva 5 on at

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Thank you for this, I have already amended the config file of power automate but the outcome is inconsistant

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OkanMTL 703 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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Have you tried @Highboy recommendation on slowing your flow with times between actions? You could also check in the history of your unattended flow run, which action fails the most and work from there.

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