September 2024 - Dashboard Release Notes

We’ve added an innovative way to unlock key-value data in your databases which has traditionally been difficult to report on.

Known as Custom Fields, you can now provide additional configuration to have the Dashboard create objects automatically from the key-value data where previously you would have needed to manually create these for each item. Click HERE for more information on the Custom Fields feature.

We’re excited to offer a completely rebuilt Word (docx) export functionality which is almost instant and reflects any changes you make to charts on your screen (including legend selection).

You can try it out by enabling the beta feature BROWSER_WORD_EXPORT (in pancredit_parameters table) and we’d love to hear your feedback and incorporate feedback into our upcoming releases. At present it only supports certain chart types (highcharts) which doesn’t include tables, card charts, maps. Any unsupported will simply fall back to the existing export functionality.

Example of the section from the new Word output:

Before charts are fully rendered, we populate the cell with the Chart Title to give an indication of what is loading in. Previously, this was just the Chart Name but now this preview will more closely resemble the panel heading that will appear when the chart fully loads. It will show some of the icons that will be displayed as well as the title/subtitle appropriate for that chart. Replacement cannot be done at this stage meaning any form of replacement within the title/subtitle will result in the preview not including that element. Translations, however, are available so you can expect any translated values to be represented in the accurately.

A new User/Role permission has been added at the Admin level, to determine whether or not the User is allowed to access/edit the configuration within the APIs tab. The new “edit apis” permission defaults to ‘True’ for Admin users at the User Permission level and ‘False’ for Roles.

JDBC drivers are now loaded into a separate class-loader from system libraries, significantly improving the chances of untested drivers being compatible. As part of this, the Apache Drill driver has been included in the default distribution since this was a driver which had such an issue previously.

Our greatly enhanced, rebuilt pdf and ppt exports for single charts have been enabled by default in this release. If you experience any issue please let us know, for a limited time you can switch back to the old mode by using the beta flag OLD_PDF_EXPORT and OLD_PPT_EXPORT.

Resolved a Known Issue with exporting drilldown-level charts, when using the enhanced Single Chart PDF & PowerPoint export functionality - a Known Issue with the August 24 release.

When a user exports a chart at a drilldown level, the export will now correctly capture the chart from the appropriate hierarchy level, provided the chart type is supported. If the chart type is unsupported, the export will automatically revert to using the renderer service.

By removing some additional variable replacement that wasn’t useful we’ve improved the performance of editable tables. Especially when sending large volumes of data.

Resolved an issue where page actions such as a resize could result in duplicate rows of table data could be sent to the editable tables endpoint.

Improved report performance by allowing each chart within a report to load in parallel. This does not affect how the charts are rendered, only how they are returned from the back end. Report performance logs have been updated to display the loading times for each individual chart, as well as an overall loading time, which will now be lower due to the requests for individual charts being asynchronous.

Enhanced the reliability of scheduling tables in Excel format by implementing additional checks to ensure the file's integrity before returning it to the scheduler, along with improvements in naming conventions, increased logging, and better error handling.

Despite having the necessary permissions, Admin Users (other than Super Admin) were unable to save Analytics models to the Data Connection, due to a CORS setting issue.

Comparators like ‘>=' and special characters like '&’ would appear HTML encoded on Analytics Charts.

Using the password reset function with invalid details previously lead to an exception being displayed.

Within the Organisations Configuration Panel dropdown list, users will now only see Organisation values where they are either an admin or have 'schedule' permission for those Organisations. If they are an admin, all content will be displayed relating to those Organisations, otherwise an error will be returned that informs the user that they do not have access.

Resolved an issue where the CORS settings were not being applied correctly.

A number of areas of performance improvement were identified and implemented

A number of additional areas where translations occur in the dashboard have now been added.

Column ‘edit apis’

• added to mis_users and mis_roles tables

pi#2524

24595 & 31607

User Roles / Permissions

Run 

vCPU 

RAM (GB) 

Max Threads 

Observed 

1 

2 

4 

20 

System hit a limit at 170 charts served per minute.  The server remained stable at this point, and when load was reduced continued to operate efficiently. 

2 

2 

4 

30 

The system performed well and was able to perform to ~350 chart requests. The server remained stable 

3 

2 

4 

40 

The system performed well and was able to perform to ~400 chart requests. The server remained stable 

4 

50 

The system was still able to perform to ~350 chart requests per minute, but the observed performance was significantly reduced. 

5 

1 

4 

40 

The system was significantly slower even whilst no load was provided.  We struggled to load the system beyond ~120 charts per minute.  The server did remain stable. 

6 

2 

8 

40 

The system was able to perform ~470 charts requests per minute, was stable and user experience was good even while loaded.  It was observed that the additional 4GB of RAM was not used by the system. 

7 

2 

4 

40 

Following test 6, we re-performed test 5 to confirm that the additional 4GB of RAM was unnecessary, and the experience on this test 5 and 6 was comparable. 

8 

2 load balanced * 2vCPU 

4GB 

40 

Where able to show that the resources where effectively run over load balanced nodes, and achieved ~1,000 charts per minute, and the solution was very stable even under this load. 

9 

As Above 

Confirmed that the system could be loaded and unloaded without effect.