The latest version of our development suite is now available for our community users.
This release brings lots of improvements for BotCity Studio, Runner and CLI as well many bug fixes.
Make sure to download and update your setup by login into your BotCity Maestro and clicking at Download BotStudio.
Let’s take a look at the shiny new features and the bugs that got fixed with this new release of our SDK.
BotCity Studio
Jumping from the 2.13.0 to 2.16.0, BotCity Studio 8 new features and had a total of 9 major bugs squashed.
Login with E-mail
Following the new BotCity Maestro version, the new update of BotCity Studio requires users to log in with their e-mail and password.
Click and Drag to Crop
We changed the way users interacted with the UI panel to make the image cropping more natural.
Before this change, users were required to click on the top-left corner of an area of interest, move the mouse to the bottom-right corner, click and move back to the top-left corner and finally click again to confirm the crop area. While this method allowed for a tight selection it felt unnatural to most users.
Now you can simply click and drag to select your desired crop area.
Preferences Panel
This new addition will make it easy for you to select the default language for the OCR component under the document processing module when dealing with images and photographic/scanned PDF files, the font size for the code editor and much more.
Dark Mode
Is a developer tool really a developer tool without dark mode? Now you can easily switch between light and dark mode using our brand new preferences panel.
BotCity Studio.exe for Windows
Microsoft Windows users now can skip the BotStudio.bat and jump directly into double clicking the new BotCity Studio executable file shipped with the Windows SDK.
Others Changes
Other improvements include the addition of scrollbars into the document processing panel and support for both F9 and ⏩ on MacOS for screen capture.
BotCity Runner
Our BotCity Runner received many important new features and a fix to a memory leak impacting clients with large volume of tasks being executed over a short period of time.
Headless Execution
Now you can run the BotCity Runner in headless mode (without graphical user interface). This means that it can now be used with headless servers, including containers such as Docker and even serverless frameworks such as AWS Lambda and Azure Functions. How cool is that?
The SDK package offers two scripts to launch BotCity Runner:
- BotRunner-gui: starts the BotCity Runner in graphical mode and requires you to click the start button to communicate with the BotCity Maestro orchestrator.
- BotRunner: starts the BotCity Runner in the background and automatically establishes the connection with the BotCity Maestro orchestrator.
⚠️ Important ⚠️
In case you are invoking the BotCity Runner via the command line without one of our wrapper scripts described above, it will start into headless mode by default. To revert to the graphical start up you will need to add the -gui flag when starting the code.Custom Python Codes
Up to now, developers were asked to use our Template Project for Python projects. While it provides lots of awesome features, it imposes a format that can be tricky to integrate if you already have a codebase developed with Python and you are looking for a way to easily orchestrate it or if you just want to have a single Python file and not need to bother with the structure of a Python package.
We heard you and now the BotCity Runner support the execution of custom Python projects.
To develop a Python project in this new format you will need a minimum of two files:
- bot.py: This is the file that will be invoked to start your bot. Here you can do anything you would like.
- requirements.txt: Here is where you will describe your external Python dependencies such as pandas, numpy, etc, so that they can be installed by the BotCity Runner before executing your code.
After you have your files, you can simply compress your folder (make a zip file or a tarball) and use the BotCity CLI to deploy, update and release this new code into the BotCity Maestro orchestrator.
Keep an eye on our YouTube channel for more details about this feature as well as a tutorial over the next week.
BotCity CLI
Our command line interface received a new command to allow you to cancel tasks and the help functionality was updated as well.
Task Cancel
Now you can cancel tasks using the BotCity CLI instead of finalizing them with an error status. To do so is really simple.
# For Windows
> BotCLI.bat task cancel -taskId 12345
# For Linux and MacOS
> BotCLI.sh task cancel -taskId 12345
