We are pleased to present our latest offering of pi - our February 2023 release! This page helps summarise and familiarise you with the changes we have made and is supported (where applicable) with useful videos to help explain the changes we have delivered.

Here’s what we’ll cover.

Added

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There are now two new fields present in the ‘Configuration’ section of each Theme within the ‘Themes’ settings panel: “Favicon” and “Apple Touch Icon”. These new fields allow you to set theme specific icons to files within a theme's “img” directory or to applicable and accessible URL links. If these fields are blank or the icon specified is unable to be used for some reason, the default icons in the ‘pi-internal’ image directory ( tomcat/webapps/pi/css/pi-internal-theme/img) will be used instead. These icons dynamically update based upon the currently active theme and local changes to the files will be reflected upon refreshing the page. Prior to logging in, the icons will be set to those associated with the ‘Default’ theme i.e. the one set under the “Global Variables” settings panel.

A new audit type of “Failed User Login“ has been added to mis_audits table to log any unsuccessful attempts to log in to the dashboard. “Failed User Login“ will also include a usercode, if appropriate, together with the relevant error message.

A new column “Detail Info“ has also been added to mis_audits table, which when used for the login information, will include the type of the login which was used during both successful and unsuccessful logins. The types included:

• 'User Login Using OIDC', 'User Login Using JWT', 'User Login Using SAML', 'User Login With Username And Password', 'User Login Using API'

Example of the audits table to showcase the most recent login information:

A new column “Detail Info” has been added to mis_audits table and when used with the charts audit, this will record the ID of the category that the chart was refreshed in. For example, if the chart was originally created in category 19 but then also added to category 23, both categories IDs will be logged in to mis_audits table under “Detail Info“ column.

Please see the example:

The system now provides API endpoints to bulk create and delete

• User Variables

• User Restrictions

• Role Variables

• Role Restrictions

Please refer to the swaggerhub API documentation for details.

This is to make sure multiple e.g. User Restrictions can be created or deleted at the same time by making one API request, which should significantly improve performance if such activity is needed.

Currently Global Variables don’t support bulk requests. Most dashboards should not need to set lots of Global Variables.

A new field has been added to the Snowflake data connection configuration page that allows you to specify which role you would like to make the connection using. Please note that this role must have already been associated with the account prior to making this connection.

Adam/Ken - A section on this new “Role” setting and perhaps some updated screenshots should be added to this Confluence page:

How to connect pi to a Snowflake instance

Help text for categories available in the API (Pi #1503)

Categories

It is now possible to add help text to categories. This allows user to provide further information about the contents of the category when accessing them through the API. Help text can either be added when creating or editing a category through the API, or by adding help text in the Categories Tab of the dashboard (see picture).

NOTE: Accessing the help text for a category is currently only available through the API. It is not currently displayed anywhere in the dashboard as part of the UI.

Free Format data connections now display a new checkbox labelled “Supply Credential if Blank“. If checked (set to true), user name and password will be set as part of the data connection even if their input fields have been left blank. When unchecked (set to false), the user name and or password will not be set as part of the data connection if their respective field has been left blank.

Adam/Ken - Requires some documentation updates - see ticket for details/suggested verbiage

Added the ability to edit the labels of the x, y and y2 axis for merged charts as you can with every other type of cartesian chart.

Changed

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The default value for the Maximum Database Connection setting for Tomcat has been increased to 150. This is in response to customers having issues with the dashboard performance being impacted when making large numbers of concurrent connections to the database.

It is recommended that all customers increase this number in line with the new default value as a minimum. This can be done through the configuration tool GUI altering the dashboard.json file in the dashboard directory or setting the value through the relevant environment variable (PI_TOMCAT_MAX_TOTAL_DB_CONNECTIONS). The setting can be found in the advanced section of the Tomcat settings for the dashboard (see pictures below).

Adam/Ken - New value default needs reflecting on Environment Variables page (below)

Environment Variables

Setting through the GUI:

Setting in the dashboard.json:

Both the “Object Start Quote” and “Object End Quote” fields for Snowflake data connections will now default to a double quotation mark.

Fixed

This fix is to make sure database connections are closed properly, so that they don’t prevent SQL queries made outside of the same application.

Previously, when entering text with angle brackets i.e. ‘<text>' into an alternative column title on a table, it would cause the table to not load and spin forever. Now, it correctly convert it to null and leaves the alternative column title blank if it contains '<text>’.