The Vanishing Act: What Happened to UiPath's Specific Content Feature?

Recently, UiPath introduced a significant change that affected many workflows, including mine—the removal of the Specific Content feature. This feature was incredibly useful for managing and accessing relevant data within a queue in UiPath’s Orchestrator.

At first, I didn’t realize this change was the cause of my issues. It happened around the same time as a major UiPath outage across Europe in mid-March 2024, which affected communication mining in the EU region. I initially assumed this outage was responsible for the missing specific content in my queue items. However, even after the outage was resolved, the data was still unavailable, leading me to dig deeper.

After searching the UiPath forum, I discovered that many other users were experiencing the same issue. When trying to retrieve Specific Content from transactions using the “Get Queue Items” activity, the reference would appear, but the specific content always returned as null. A UiPath employee later confirmed on the forum that they had officially discontinued support for retrieving specific content through this activity. This change was originally announced in December.

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

What’s Changing and Why?

On December 15th, UiPath announced new rate limits as part of an effort to maintain optimal performance, enhance security, and ensure consistent service availability—an approach considered an industry best practice.

New Rate Limits:

The following endpoints will now be restricted to 100 API requests per minute per tenant:

It’s important to note that these limits do not affect adding queue items or processing jobs. Actions like adding an item to a queue, removing it, updating its status, or initiating and processing jobs remain unaffected.

What Else Will Be Removed?

Many processes have relied on the ‘Get Queue Items’ activity, which provided valuable data used later in the workflow. Previously, we could retrieve information from Specific Content, but now it consistently returns null.

Specific Content isn’t the only field affected—several fields are being removed from the Jobs and Queue Items GetAll endpoints as well.

With these changes, SpecificContent will always be null. UiPath now recommends using the GET /odata/QueueItems endpoint instead.

Initially, At first, I was puzzled when attempting to send a request using ItemKey, only to encounter an error.

Final Thoughts

The inability to retrieve Specific Content has disrupted several processes I developed and maintained. Major changes like this should be communicated directly to Orchestrator admins via email. I only discovered this update through a forum discussion.

While I acknowledge that the news section in the documentation is the official source for updates, it’s easy to miss crucial details—especially when there’s little time to comb through documentation. The new approach, requiring separate requests for each item, has significantly slowed down processes, which I’ve had to justify to clients.

I’m unsure if the UiPath Product Team fully considered the impact of this change. I understand their reasoning, but perhaps there was a better way to implement it.

Have you faced similar issues in your workflows?

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Dominik Put

RPA Consultant and Business Analyst at Destan. Expert in Process Automation and Business Process Optimization.

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