Known issues and limitations
Get a quick overview of the known issues and limitations for IBM watsonx Orchestrate.
Building automations
| Area affected | Description |
|---|---|
| Building automations | If you export an automation, you should not rename the generated compressed file and try to import the compressed file again. |
| Managing collaborators | If the list of users you can add as collaborators to your automation does not load, you can still add collaborators by using their watsonx Orchestrate user ID. To retrieve their user ID, users must complete
the following steps: 1. Open an existing automation or create a new one. 2. Copy their user ID from the URL: https://www.watson-orchestrate.ibm.com/build/<userID>/<automation_name> |
| Modeling data | Do not create two data types where the only difference in their name is the capitalization of the first letter. |
| Starting skills from a workflow | Learn about the limitations when calling skills from a workflow and when using OpenAPI constructs. |
| Starting skills from a workflow that uses filter input | If a skill has a filter input, you must use the following syntax to specify the input: {"where":{"or":[{"id":1},{"id":2},...,{"id":20"},{"id":21}]}}, where id is the queryable parameter as documented in the Filter input for skills topic. |
| Starting skills from workflow | All skills that are started by a workflow must exist in the workflow originator’s skill set, and the application must be configured. Otherwise, the workflow fails. To resolve, add and configure the missing skills. For in-flight processes, you can ask an administrator to retry the skill activity by using the process inspector. Otherwise, restart the workflow after you add the skills. |
| Workflow automation | For any watsonx Orchestrate tenants provisioned before 15 December that have the Automation Builder feature, all the watsonx Orchestrate users must be synchronized to the Automation
Builder by the owner of the tenant or a new Admin that was added to the tenant. If the user synchronization is not done, the workflow automation in the Automation Builder doesn't work. The tenant owner or the new Admin needs to do the following steps: 1. Log in to the watsonx Orchestrate tenant. 2. From the main menu, click Automation. 3. In the Automations page, click the Workflow Admin button. 4. In the Workflow Admin page, from the upper left menu, click User Management. 5. Click User Synchronization. 6. Click the Synchronize Tenant Users button. |
| Removing and re-adding members | When a member is removed from the team and re-added with the Builder or Admin role, the member's workflow permissions might be incorrect. This can cause errors when editing workflows that the member is not recognized as Author (Repository
Write Access) or Administrator. To resolve this limitation, an Admin needs to complete the following: 1. Go to the Manage Team page. 2. From the Member tab, switch the role of the affected member to User, then back to the desired role. This updates the permission properly. |
| Creating workflow variables for starting automations | When building a workflow automation, you can create an activity to call an automation. If you try to create variables for the automation parameters from the Variables tab, you might not see the data types for the parameters of the activity. To resolve this, go to the diagram, click the automation that you're calling, and click Define data mapping. The data types should then appear in the Variables tab. |
| Publishing a workflow as a skill | When you publish a new version of a workflow that contains enum inputs, the form displayed in the chat might show duplicate values in the drop-down. |
| Previewing workflow automations | When you preview a workflow that calls a separate automation, you won't see any tasks related to that separate automation in the preview mode task list. In order to work with the tasks from that separate automation, you must go to the Tasks page, rather than the tasks page in preview mode. |
| IBM Robotic Process Automation skills | The IBM RPA skills are not working in the workflow, even though they are working in the watsonx Orchestrate chat. |
| Importing samples and tutorials | Only one user in each tenant can import each industry sample or discovery tutorial. The user who imported the sample or tutorial must add other users as collaborators for them to use the sample or tutorial. |
| Publishing an automation as a skill | If your workflow automation uses user type inputs or outputs, or contains nested user type inputs or outputs, you can’t publish it as a skill in the skill catalog. However, you can still call the automation through another automation. Publishing an automation might fail when the following actions are taken: 1. Create an automation that includes a decision based on an imported automation, and publish the automation before 2024. 2. Delete the automation. 3. Create another automation that includes a decision based on the same imported automation in 2024 or later. 4. Publish the newly created automation. This publication might fail. To publish the new automation successfully, you need to remove the skill that was published before 2024 from the skill catalog first. |
| Updating workflow activities that call automations that do not exist anymore | If you add an automation activity to your workflow activity, and then delete the published automation used by that activity later, the workflow activity reference to the automation does not automatically update. You cannot update the reference to the automation from the Activity properties panel. If you want to replace the previous activity, you must manually delete the activity, and then create a new activity reference. |
| Data mappings are not automatically updated for decision, automation, and skill activities in a workflow. | When you update the inputs or outputs in the data mapping for a decision, automation, or skill implementation, the change is not automatically updated in the workflow activity, and you might still see the old types and parameters. Click Refresh connection in the workflow activity properties to reflect your changed inputs and outputs. |
| Changing a role | Changing your role from admin to builder or from builder to admin deletes all automations from your Automations page. |
| Previewing or calling a workflow as a skill | When you preview your workflow or call a workflow as a skill, you might see the error message “401 Worker object not found”. |
| Publish an automation as a skill with collaborators | A collaborator of an automation will not be able to publish a new version of the automation unless they are the most recent person that successfully published the automation. You might also see the same issue if you try to publish an imported
automation that another person has already published. To resolve the publishing issues, the most recent person that successfully published the automation needs to remove the skills of the automation from the skill catalog. After, any
collaborator should be able to publish a new version of the automation. For example, you might run into this issue in the following situations, where "User A" and "User B" are used to represent two separate users: - User A adds User B as a collaborator to an automation. User A publishes the automation. If User B tries to publish a new version of the automation, they might be unsuccessful. - User A exports an automation and sends it to User B. User B imports the automation. User A publishes the automation. If User B tries to publish the automation, they might be unsuccessful. |
| Changing input or output variables | Users need to remove any previously published skills if there are any changes to the input or output variables from or to the document type. |
| Language support for Automation builder | The Automation builder supports the English language only. |
| Expressions in workflows | You need to specify an integer value or an integer variable when an integer is expected. For example, when you use the expression "the element at position <position_value> in <list_name>", you need to use an integer value or an integer variable for <position_value>. If you specify a number value or a number variable instead, your workflow will get the following error when it tries to execute the expression during runtime: "EL1074E: An exception occurred while compiling an exception". |
| Returning numbers as outputs in decisions | Users might see an error when they try to run a decision skill that returns a number as the output. This scenario occurs in the chat of the AI assistant builder. |
| Skills with objects without attribute definitions | If a skill parameter or nested skill parameter has an object attribute that has no attributes, it is ignored when you find and try to use it in a workflow skill activity. The skill activity does not show the object in its data mapping. |
| Publishing a workflow | If your operation name ends with the underscore character "_", you will get an error when you try to publish the workflow. Avoid using the underscore character "_" at the end of your operation
name. To fix this error, delete and recreate the component that corresponds to the operation, and create a new operation without the underscore character at the end of the name. |
| Deleting components | If you delete a component such as a workflow, decision, or generative AI, you might see the following issues or limitations:
|
Building AI assistants
| Area affected | Description |
|---|---|
| Digression | Users can't digress to the default action behavior when they interact with actions from skills on AI assistants. |
| Skill-based actions | Skill-based actions support only shared credentials that are set through Team credentials as credential type. |
| Language support for AI assistant builder | The AI assistant builder supports the English language only. |
Building skills
| Area affected | Description |
|---|---|
| Building skills | If the summary and description fields in an OpenAPI specification are at the path level, then 3 skills are displayed for a single operation specification when you build skills by using an OpenAPI specification.
As a workaround, remove the summary and description fields from the paths section to make the import succeed. For example, remove the summary and description fields as
displayed under the path section: --------------- |
| Building skills | When you build skills through OpenAPI specifications, descriptions, default values, and enum values can't exceed the character limit of 64 characters. |
| Building skills | The requestBody property is not supported for OpenAPI skills based on the GET method. |
| Building skills from RPA | The output of skills that use RPA bots might not show values from output variables as a result. Sometimes, creating a new output variable on the bot and updating the skill might resolve the problem. |
| Combining variables and default values in custom forms | You can't combine variables from data mapping and default values in a customized input form. |
| Logo of the third-party application | If you notice a color variation in the application icon, you must revise the OpenAPI specification of the skill to avoid the usage of <style> tag within the <svg>. Refer Provide an icon to your application to view the format to provide the icon. |
| Mapping inputs from phrases | "patterns" are not currently supported in the x-ibm-nl-entities property, but will be considered as part of future enhancements. |
| Configuring an imported app endpoint | The "Test your connection" option in the Enhance this skill page doesn't use the custom endpoint to test the connection. Therefore, you can test the connection for your new endpoint with this feature. |
| Configuring an imported app endpoint | Even though it is necessary to reconfigure the app credentials to use its skills, the app appears as connected on the skill catalog if the app has a previous connection. |
| Japanese translations for the Skills and apps in the Skill studio page | The Skills and apps in the Skill studio page has texts that aren't translated to Japanese. |
| Language support for OpenAPI builder | The OpenAPI builder feature supports the English language only. |
| Skill with permission specification is appearing in personal and team skill set | The skill with the specification "x-ibm-permission": "personal:view" or "x-ibm-permission": "team:view" is appearing in both personal and team skill set, and not just in
one skill set, as the specification defines. |
Managing team members
| Area affected | Description |
|---|---|
| Deleting the credential type of an app | If the Credential type for the app is set to Team, and the connection is deleted from the skill catalog, the Connected by option will still display the name of the user who originally connected the app to the team. As a workaround, edit and update the connection type from the Manage team page. |
| Japanese translations in the Manage team page | The Manage team page has texts that aren't translated to Japanese. |
| Team skill set is missing for new tenant | The team skill set is missing for newly provided tenant. However, after the admin adds a user to the tenant, the team skill set becomes visible. |
Monitoring usage
| Area affected | Description |
|---|---|
| Skill sets created from AI assistant builder | Admins can't monitor usage data of skills that are used in team skill sets created from environments in AI assistant builder. |
| Japanese translations in the Monitor skills page | The Monitor skills page has texts that aren't translated to Japanese. |
Prebuilt apps and skills
| Area affected | Description |
|---|---|
| Output format of productivity skills | The output format of productivity skills such as Create an issue or Create a pull request on the GitHub app returns an output as a decimal number, rather than an integer. |
| Duplicate skills appearing on watsonx Orchestrate home page | An app update might not recognize that the skills were already added in the previous version. Consequently, it can lead to duplicate skills appearing on the watsonx Orchestrate home page. |
| Using IBM Document processing app | 1. Upon clicking the Connect app, you are prompted to enter the Bearer Token, which is not required. As a temporary workaround, you can provide some dummy data to connect. The connection information to
IBM Document Processing is handled by watsonx Orchestrate internally. 2. To protect the pods that implement the service and make sure of the availability, IBM Document processing skills have some limitations about their usage. The following list describes these limitations. Documents can't exceed any of the following size limits: - Size more than 10 MB per document. - More than 600 pages per document. - More than 60 pages with images per document. - More than 1000 images in each document. - If concurrent requests exceed the maximum capacity, the requests might fail. |
| Connecting to the watsonx.ai app | Upon clicking the Connect app, you are prompted to enter the Bearer Token, which is not required. As a temporary workaround, you can provide some dummy data to connect. The connection information to watsonx.ai is handled by watsonx Orchestrate internally. |
| Upload a file skill on the Box app | A file can only be up to 16 MB in size when uploaded as an attachment. |
| Delete a folder skill on the Box app | While you use the skill Delete a folder, you must set the Recursive parameter to true. This ensures that all files and subfolders within the folder are also deleted. If you notice that the skill is
still not deleting the files or subfolders within the folder, then remove the skill and re-add it before trying again. |
| Create a feed comment skill on the Salesforce app | You might notice issues when you select the Draft option in the Status field. Refrain by using the Draft option until the issue is fixed. |
| Create asset skill skill on the Salesforce app | An error message "The Create an asset skill can’t be used right now. Retry your request later" might appear when you use the skill. Make sure you mentioned an Account ID or a valid Contact ID with an
Account ID mapped to it, or both. |
| Create a contact or Create an account skills on the Salesforce app | An error message "The provided data for the Account object isn't in the correct format for the application. Ensure that the data provided for the operation is valid. Ensure that the properties of the object comply with
the definition in the OpenAPI document.... " might appear when you use the skill. As a workaround, remove and re-add the skill to your skill set. Verify that the connection details have also been removed and added again. |
| Create an order skill on the Salesforce app | - An error message "We can't complete the CREATE action in Salesforce because an account ID or contract ID is required for the Order object. Ensure that you completed the Account ID or Contract ID field
for this action" might appear when you use the skill. Make sure you mentioned an Account ID or a valid Contract ID with an Account ID mapped to it, or both. - You might also notice issues when you select the Activated option in the Status field. Refrain by using the Activated option until the issue is fixed. |
| Adding a connection to a Salesforce skill | You might notice an incorrect page error when attempting to connect to a Salesforce skill. Reach out to your builder and request them to set up a minimum of one Salesforce skill. This ensures that the Salesforce application page appears in the skill catalog where connection information is available. |
| Connecting to apps | watsonx Orchestrate saves the credentials that are provided to connect an app without validation, and executing the skill displays an error message if the credentials are incorrect. You can edit the connection and specify the correct credentials to use the skill. |
| Granting permission to Microsoft Outlook application | Administrators getting errors while granting access to Microsoft Outlook must enable the option Allow users to request access to this application to provide the users with self-service application access. For more information, see Enable self-service application assignment. |
| Updating a prebuilt skill | When a prebuilt skill is updated, it might be necessary to remove the outdated skill and add the updated skill to your skill set. |
| Skills that run delete actions are returning no records | Some skills from prebuilt apps return the "No records were found. Try again later." response for delete actions even if the skills complete successfully. |
| Language support for prebuilt apps and skills | Prebuilt apps and skills are available in the English language only. |
| Connecting to the Asana app | watsonx Orchestrate fails to connect to the Asana app due to connection issues from Asana side. The issue is observed in the trial accounts that reach the maximum limit of connections and can result in failure. |
| Skills that run delete actions from HubSpot CRM app | The skills from the HubSpot CRM app that run delete actions return success even if the item to be deleted doesn't exist in the application. |
| Connecting to the Salesforce Account Engagement app | The connection to the Salesforce Account Engagement app is not available. |
| Availability of prebuilt apps and skills | Starting from 29 August, you can use the prebuilt apps and skills that are available for you in the product. However, if the tenant that you are member was provisioned before 29 August, the apps and skills won't be available. |
| Data mapping for the id input parameter of the Delete a file skill from the Box app | You might receive a response with the status code "500" and the "Internal Server Error" message when you run a workflow that contains the Delete a file skill from the Box app, and this
skill has a data mapping that is configured for the id input parameter. As a workaround, instead of using the id parameter, use the where parameter in the data mapping to define the ID of the file that you want to delete. For the where parameter, use the following syntax: {"id":"<FILE_ID>"}, where <FILE_ID> is the ID of the file
in the Box application.This known issue happens when you run an instance of a workflow in the Preview mode. |
Building skills from apps
| Area affected | Description |
|---|---|
| Discovering skills through IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation | You might notice timeout issues while discovering apps by using IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation as a service and On premises. The issue can be caused if there are too many automations. |
| Connecting to apps | watsonx Orchestrate currently does not support insecure communication with servers that use self-signed certificates or any certificates not signed by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA). If you get the following error message, ask the administrator of the server to change the certificate to a certificate signed by a trusted CA: You couldn't connect. An error occurred while processing the request. Error: unable to get local issuer certificate. |
| Member credential type option for skill-based actions | A skill set to use personal credentials fails to run in AI assistants with the "You aren't connected" error even if the app is properly connected. Only Team credentials are allowed to be used with skill-based actions. |
Enhancing skills
| Area affected | Description |
|---|---|
| Output (Table and Text responses) | When you use the standard Table response in your skill and decide to switch to a consistent Text response, your change works normally. However, if you want to switch again from Text to Table response, first, you must remove the text inserted into Text field, and then return to the Table response successfully. |
| Adding or enhancing skills that are based on automations | When you enhance an automation based skill or adding such a skill to a skill set, you see a separate tile for each workflow based operation, and a single tile that contains all decision based operations for the automation. To find a skill quickly, search for the operation or skill name instead of the application name. |
| Inputs of the skill being enhanced are not generated as expected in the slot logic flow | For the skill being enhanced, you might not see its input parameters generated as outputs of the slot logic flow as you might expect. If the input parameters are in the request body, then you might see just one output parameter called "body" with a complex type that is generated with the contained parameters. Other parameter types, such as header and query parameters, are generated as an output parameter of the logic flow with the expected name and type. |
| Japanese translations in the Enhance this skill page | The Enhance this skill page has texts that aren't translated to Japanese. |
| Language support for the Auto-generated phrases feature | The Auto-generated phrases feature supports the English language only. |
Generic issues
| Area affected | Description |
|---|---|
| Issues with watsonx Orchestrate login experience on Chrome v128 | When logging into watsonx Orchestrate using Chrome version 128.0.6613.85, the landing page is either slow or doesn't render. A blank page appears upon selecting a tenant. Browser refresh may not help, but holding the shift key while refreshing the browser takes you to the tenant. To resolve the issue, upgrade Chrome to version 128.0.6613.120 (Official Build). |
| Application tiles load slowly on the home screen | The loading and display time of application tiles on the watsonx Orchestrate home page may be prolonged, particularly when there are many applications present on your home screen. The issue will be prioritized and considered as part of future enhancements. |
| Log in to watsonx Orchestrate | Sometimes, when you log in to watsonx Orchestrate, it throws an error that says "We couldn't find you", which results from cache issues. To troubleshoot this problem, clear your cache. |
| Memory persistence in watsonx Orchestrate | When you refresh the browser, or log out of your active watsonx Orchestrate instance, watsonx Orchestrate is reset. For example, if you use the Find candidates for a job skill to generate a list of candidates then click the header to go back to the home page, your results from the previous query will be gone. To avoid this limitation, consider completing the course of action before leaving the context of your actions (downloading and emailing applicants after retrieving the candidate list). |
Skill catalog
| Area affected | Description |
|---|---|
| The search on the skill catalog page does not return the expected result | The search functionality on the Skill catalog page aims to find exact matches or synonyms of the search keyword. Therefore, the search in the skill catalog page currently fails to return the desired result for certain apps. For example,
when you search for the monday.com app, by using keywords such as monday or monday.com does not yield the expected
result. Instead, users must use the keyword mondaydotcom to obtain the app as the search result. |
| Japanese translations in the Skill catalog page | The Skill catalog page and its subpages as the apps page and the connection pane have texts that aren't translated to Japanese. |
| Skills with Japanese characters are not searchable | The search in the Skill catalog page doesn't find results for skills named with Japanese characters. |
Skill flow
| Area affected | Description |
|---|---|
| The Cancel option in a skill flow | The Cancel button in a skill flow does not cancel the current step in your chat conversation but cancels the entire chat conversation. |
| Updating filters while running a skill flow | Currently, it is not feasible to update the filters that were chosen in the preceding step of your skill flow. To refresh the filters, you must start the skill flow from the beginning. |
| Next best action for a skill flow | When a skill flow has another skill flow set as the next best action, the skill flow does not automatically pre-populate the values based on the output or input from the previous skill. You must manually add the values. |
| Updating a skill flow | Updating a skill flow might only be partially successful in some circumstances. As a builder, you might not be aware that the team skill set update failed. As a user, you might notice an error while running a skill flow if any component skill that was introduced in the recent update of the flow is not present in your personal skill set. To resolve the issue, add the concerned skill set to your skill set and then run the skill. |
| Japanese translations for the skill flow page | The skill flow page has texts that aren't translated to Japanese. |
IBM SaaS Console
| Area affected | Description |
|---|---|
| Billed usage | The IBM SaaS Console is not showing billed usage information. |
watsonx Orchestrate chat
| Area affected | Description |
|---|---|
| Japanese translations in the watsonx Orchestrate chat | The watsonx Orchestrate chat has texts that aren't translated to Japanese. |
| Getting content from files with skills | If you use skills that get the contents from files like the Get file content skill from the Box app, or skills from workflows that have variables with Document type, you receive the file contents as plain
text or binary depending on the file extension.Text files that have .txt extension return the file content as a human-readable content (plain text) as output. However, for binary files, which include other file extensions
like .docx and .pdf, the skill returns the content encoded as Base64.As a workaround, you can use a Base64 decoder to decode the content to plain text. |
watsonx Orchestrate Beta chat
The following table describes the known issues and limitations that are specific to the watsonx Orchestrate Beta chat:
| Area affected | Description |
|---|---|
Starting skills with direct mention (@) to AI assistants
|
When a skill is called by using the user's prompt with direct mention (@) to an AI assistant, the default AI assistant (watsonx) might not associate the inputs that are given for the skill in the users' prompt with the wanted
skill.Instead, the default AI assistant (watsonx) might process the prompt by using the base LLM. |
| Routing to AI assistants | Sometimes when you run a skill, you might see the following issues: You might face the issue if you used the current chat for completing other actions. As a workaround, you can try to run the same skill in a new chat. |
| Routing to different AI assistants | The routing to an AI assistant might occur to different AI assistants that contain the same keywords that users used in their prompts in the AI assistants' description. It can happen in cases where those keywords were present in AI assistants' description but were modified or removed. |
| Small talks might not work as expected | The base LLM might not return the expected responses for small talks. |
| Live agent support | Live agent is not supported in the watsonx Orchestrate Beta chat. |
| The input form for a previous skill shows up instead of the form for the skill prompted | When you first prompt an AI assistant to run a skill, you get the input form for the wanted skill. However, the next prompts to skills show the input form of the first skill that you prompted to run. For the issue to happen, your next prompts in the conversation must route to the same AI assistant that responded to your previous prompt in the conversation. |
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