Open

We are pleased to present our latest offering of pi - our October 2022 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.

Patch Release

The October release contained new functionality that allowed users to encrypt scheduled attachments and reports, please see here for more information. Unfortunately, this caused an issue with existing schedules. We addressed this in patch release pi.2022-10-12.1.

The patch release pi.2022-10-12.2 addresses a vulnerability issue with Apache Common Text that was recently identified. You can find more information about this issue here.

An issue with the Panintelligence logo appearing on PDF files when users had specified their own logo in themes has now been resolved in the patched release pi.2022-10-12.3.

Added

With effect from this release of the dashboard, you will now be able to insert an entire category into a report

 When you click on the ‘Insert a category as the next page' icon, you will be able to select the category to insert.

• You will only be able to select categories that contain data i.e. parent categories cannot be selected

• Before inserting the category into a report, you will be able to preview it in a new browser tab by clicking the ‘Open’ icon (this button can be disabled for embedding solutions, to avoid opening another instance of the dashboard)

• When selecting a Category, any Category Objects from that Category will not be added to the report. This is because one page in a report is similar to a category and a report could potentially contain multiple categories

A new System Variable, ‘ENABLE_OPENING_DASHBOARD_AS_TAB’, has been added to Dashboard Configuration>Settings. This is a System Variable, so if you need to have different configuration for a specific user, you can override the value by supplying ‘true’ or ‘false’.

Please see this page in piDocumentation for more information.

Variables can now be used for Object Labels. When a variable is used on an Object Label, the object will display the text derived from the variable.

Open

Please see this page in piDocumentation for more information.

It is now possible to encrypt the attachments and reports associated with schedules. This will encrypt attachments sent with emails, as well as any files saved to a directory or S3 bucket.

Encryption is handled at the schedule level, meaning that choosing to encrypt on a given schedule will encrypt all of its attachments in a single zip file. This file will then be attached to the email, and can also be saved to a directory or S3 bucket. The .zip file will have the same name as the provided schedule name.

Directory location and S3 buckets can be defined in the new Encryption tab in the schedule editor of the Dashboard. Encrypted files that are saved to a directory will be saved to the ‘schedule_files’ directory in your ‘Dashboard’ directory, unless an alternative directory name is supplied through the BASE_SCHEDULE_DIRECTORY variable in the global variables tab.

Including an attachment password automatically means that all attached files will be encrypted. Without this, unencrypted individual attachments will be sent/saved to directories and s3 buckets as previously expected.

Please see this page in piDocumentation for more information.

‘Starts with’ and ‘ends with’ operators have been added to our chart filters in the chart editor. These work like the ‘like’ operator, but only match the value if it starts with or ends with the provided string, respectively.

Similar to exporting and importing Data Connections, the ability to export and import Reports and Schedules has been added to the system.

Please see this page in piDocumentation for more information.

For embedding solutions, the ‘Send this dashboard’ button, found under ‘More Options’ at the top-right of the Dashboard

can now be disabled by unticking the ENABLE_OPENING_DASHBOARD_AS_TAB variable, which can be found in Dashboard Configuration>Settings>Global Variables.

It is now possible to set up data connections that use connection pools using Variables for the username and password.

The following screenshot shows the Variable USER_NAME being used in the data connection:

When generating a language file in the dashboard, user created details from card charts (text in the chart body and footer) will now be included in the exported properties file. This will allow for translation of this text in the dashboard, please refer to the Multilingual section in pi Documentation for further details.

Changed

When the ‘Use Target Values on Label’ option is selected when adding targets to charts

the added label will no longer include the text ‘Target Value’ or ‘Target’ as part of the displayed text.

Please see this page in piDocumentation for more information.

When there were too many users, the system could not handle displaying users. Changes have been made to the system to improve performance, so that the dashboard UI doesn't crash when having such amount of data. These changes apply to:

• Users screen

• Every tab on the User Access screen, including ‘Sync User Access’

• The User selection screen in Scheduler

The Settings screen now includes 2 new options under ‘Features and Performance’:

Please refer to this page in piDocumentation for more information.

Previously, in order to manage User Access, an admin had to have Edit Categories, Edit Users, and Edit Roles permissions. We have made a change to the system and introduced a new permission, ‘Can Manage User Access’ - this permission can be added to Users and Roles.

Please see this page in piDocumentation for more information.

When you create a table and change column widths ratio in the chart editor, the renderer will respect the column widths set and will export the columns as set in the chart editor.

This change is applied to both single mode chart exports and report exports in PowerPoint and Word for all table types.

Please see this page in piDocumentation for more information.

The slim builds of the Dashboard have now been removed from all distribution channels. Slim builds consisted of a docker tag _slim or a checkbox in the installer on Windows. In addition, the legacy webapps such as the v1 API which are not supported are now removed fully from distribution.

Our renderer is now configured to be able to take requests from multiple dashboards at once.

The ‘dashboard url’ property still remains, which can be configured via the config tool gui, environment variables or the dashboard.json file, but now this is sent to the dashboard rather than the renderer, which stops the renderer from being locked to one dashboard. This property is set exactly how it was before.

The main scenario this affects is when you are using the split container set up to run our product and have everything within the same docker network. In this set up, the internal port for the dashboard has been exposed, allowing you to use either the internal or external port from the dashboard. The dashboard url for the renderer is now defined under the dashboard module in the docker compose file, as such:

Fixed

Previously, we faced an issue where the scheduler would go out of sync upon daylight savings happening. This is because the scheduler timezone was locked to UTC while the client’s timezone could possibly change upon daylight savings depending on their location.

Now, you can define a custom time zone location for the scheduler to use which will automatically change from, for example, GMT to BST, when the clocks change.

This option can be found in Dashboard Configuration>Settings>General Settings>Time Zone Location Settings. Click the drop-down and select the relevant timezone from the list.

Additionally, the time zone location will also be displayed in the Schedule editor

and Schedule monitoring screens.

Previously, on editable tables, if you set up a http call parameter but didn’t change the value for the cell relating to that column on the table, the unchanged cells would be sent as ‘undefined’ when the request was sent.

Now, it correctly sends the unchanged cells along with the changed ones.

Previously, when attempting to drill down by clicking on the bulb in the middle of the lightbulb chart and the chart was too small to display the data label, the drill down would not work. Now, you can drill down just by clicking on the bulb itself rather than the label.

The option to apply a top or bottom filter was being removed after users added ‘Additional Data’ to a chart. Now, these filters remain in place and work as intended.

When using a licence that allows single item scheduling, this does not relate to scheduling reports, schedules would save but not send. Schedules are now sending correctly when the user has a licence that only allows single item scheduling.

Previously when attempting to drill to a chart from a funnel chart, a warning message was displayed that said ‘Drill condition is not defined’.

Now, you can successfully drill to chart from a funnel chart.

Previously, when sending an email to a user to allow them to reset their password, this link could be used infinite times until the link expired 6 hours after it had been sent out.

Now, it only works once, expires once the password has been reset correctly, and is only valid for 1 hour.

When users referenced a category object within the select statement of an object/column and the value of the category object includes an apostrophe, the apostrophe was not being escaped before ending in the SQL. Now, it is being escaped correctly and the SQL query runs as normal

When the API url was put into a browser, a list of Dashboard users was being displayed when the logged on user did not have permission to view users.

Date picker should use browser locale that can be overridden by the LOCALE variable. A change has been made in this release that will ensure that a user can define the LOCALE variable, which allows having a consistent locale and ignore the browser settings when needed.

If you added a header to a piReport and then changed it to a footer, the information moved from the top of the page to the bottom correctly but the header/ footer ‘Location’ option in the Dashboard was not being updated to reflect this change.

Known Issues

If you create a table with varied column width/ratios, this setting will not be respected on Word downloads on Windows at this time. The issue will be resolved in our November 22 release.

The renderer does not work with the default settings if you are using Dashboard HTTPS. You can work around this issue by specifying your external URL in the renderer settings.