August 2024 - Dashboard Release Notes

We’re excited to offer a completely rebuilt PPT 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_PPT_EXPORT 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 and some other types of charts. Any unsupported will simply fall back to the existing export functionality.

Example of the new PPT output:

Last month we introduced the ability to define a ‘Weight’ object for Sankey Charts and Chord Diagrams (July 2024 entry) and now this functionality has been enhanced by the addition of the following settings under the ‘Attributes’ tab of the Chart Editor:

As you can see above, you now have the option to alter the presentation of the value that shows on the Node/Point tooltip in a couple of ways:

Weight Label:

In the example above, I am specifying that I want the value that would previously have shown as “Weight” regardless of the object being used to generate it to appear as “Amount” instead. I also have the option to hide the label which in the tooltip above would have resulted in “Amount: “ being removed from the final line. If I don’t specify a label here, the label from the Data Object will be used and if that hasn’t been defined the Display Name of the object will be used e.g. “Transaction Weight” in this example.

Measure Attributes

You can now customise the attributes shown above and they will be reflected in the ‘Weight’ value displayed in the tooltip. Any values not specified here will fallback to those on the underlying Data Object itself and then to their default values. Please note, similar settings are not available when using a Dimension for the Weight Object as that is not currently supported.

A new checkbox has been introduced to the Report Editor - ‘Log Report Performance Stats’ to allow users to enable performance logging for report creation and export for a single report. Only the users with ‘debug’ permission will have this checkbox available.

Report performance logging covers the main steps of the report creation and the duration the steps take to complete.

If the checkbox is enabled and when the request to export the report completes, the output of performance stats will be printed in out.log file in tomcat app logs. Example of the output in the logs:

New audit types have also been added to record the export of report in different export formats - Exported Report in PDF, Exported Report in PPT, Exported Report in WORD. Full list: /wiki/spaces/DEV/pages/1864892417

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

Improved the handling of converting 0s to nulls and nulls to 0s in data tables;

• When converting null to zero on cross tabs, empty data cells which do not exist within the database will now be populated with zeros

• When converting zero to null, values which are rounded to 0 will be converted to null

• When converting null to zero, prefixes and suffixes will be included. When converting zero to null, prefixes and suffixes will be removed

• All of the above will also apply to exports of all types, including tables inside of reports

Now, when importing a fresh data connection, or when overwriting a data connection with no password set, when the import also has no password set, it will correctly leave the password blank. The previous behaviour of being able to export data connection passwords when they are set as a variable will be retained.

Changes have been made to the code that manages the Chrome instances (used by the Renderer), specifically around the reliability of closing the browser when it’s no longer used.

Fixed an issue where users were not able to log in to the dashboard using Multi-Factor authentication setup on certain browsers (e.g. Safari, Firefox).

Resolved a performance regression apparent in some larger environments when displaying charts.

The Grails library has been updated from version 5.3.6 to version 6.2.0. This deliveres multiple improvements, whilst addressing a flagged vulnerability associated with SnakeYAML (CVE-2022-41854).

Tomcat 8.5 has reached end-of-life, and therefore we have upgraded to v9. This version has a significant period of additional support, which allows us to take advantage of future fixes in a timely manner as they become available.

Upgraded to 1.26.0 to resolve a reported security vulnerability (CVE-2024-26308).

Column ‘log_performance_stats’ added to mis_report_items table

pi#2460

Reporting

Column ‘can_have_child_connections’ added to mis_data_sources table

Exporting a drilldown chart

pi#2599

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Browser Exports

The new browser export feature (PDF and PPT) has an issue when exporting tables and other unsupported chart types that have been drilled to. If a user attempts to export these charts then the export will default to displaying the chart at the top hierarchy rather than using the renderer service for exporting unsupported chart types. This issue will be addressed in the next release.