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We are pleased to present our latest offering of pi - our November 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

It is now possible to build and send custom API requests to external APIs for the purpose of generating variables in the dashboard. These variables can then be used when drilling to a URL chart. This makes it possible to drill to a page using a generated token in the URL as a means of authentication – allowing users to drill to pages that would normally require a log in step.

Please see this page for more information.

Uers will now be able to hide the chart panel heading on Card Charts.

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Please see this page in piDocumentation for more information.

A new checkbox ‘Skip Pages With Empty Data Tables’ has been added to the reporting configuration panel, allowing the user to skip pages in the report, which contain only empty tables in its page content.

This covers different table types and will affect the reports exported or scheduled in pdf, PowerPoint or Word formats.

By default, the checkbox is unticked, allowing the reports to be exported in its original form.

If you try to export a report, containing only empty tables in its content and you have 'Skip Pages With Empty Data Tables’ ticked, an error will be thrown in the UI, asking you to check your ‘Skip Pages With Empty Data Tables’ configuration and no file will be returned. A similar error will also be displayed in the monitoring screen in the scheduler if you try to schedule such a report.

Changed

In certain circumstances the Automated Licence Manger (ALM) is not calling back to the licencing server. This will only effect customers who use automated licence keys.

The licence manager should call back to the panintelligence licence server every 24 hours, this validates the site is licenced, and sets the limits of users, user types and modules accessible. If a call back has not happened for a determined period of time then the instance will believe it is no longer licenced. This locks users out of the system.

Users trying to access the dashboard in this circumstance will not be allowed to access the dashboard. Depending on your authorisation settings users may receive a warning message - or just an error.

In addition if no licence is found users where given the wrong error message.

This has also been resolved, now a user will be told explictly if no licence key has been found.

Alpha tag for import/export for data connections, schedules and reports has now been removed and replaced with a help icon and some help text, providing information on how to import/export between different dashboard versions.

Previously when scheduling reports, the reports were using the default filter values. This means that users would be unable to schedule the same report with different filter values unless the report was duplicated.

This change ensures that users can provide filter values to override the default definition when configuring a schedule, which means that the same report can be sent with different filters.

In order to achieve this, the following changes were made:

On the Schedules screens:

• Each report attachment now has a button to launch a panel, which allows providing filter values associated to the attachment

• The panel works just like category filter selection, which supports cascading filter values

• The same report can now be added to the schedule multiple times with different filter values

On the Reports screens:

• Editing report filters can cause the definition of the overriding values to be out of sync. The report filters screen now shows the affected schedules when editing the filters

• If the schedules are affected by the change of report filters, they are disabled when saving the report. Users need to review and edit those schedules to correct the filter values accordingly, so that the reports can be sent out as expected

API changes:

• Reports can now be downloaded using the API

• Refer to the API documentation for details about downloading reports as docx, pdf, or pptx files

When creating/ editing Category Filters, for certain Category Filter types, the system offers a pop up for selecting the default value(s). The pop-up panel now has pagination, which improves performance when there are lots of values to be displayed.

The same implementation is done for selecting Report Filter Default Values.

You can more information on this page.

Due to some improvements we plan to make to the usability of the captcha login security feature we have temporarily disabled this functionality until our work is complete.

Fixed

Previously when making an API request using the Editable Tables feature, the pi application didn’t make use of Variables.

This has been changed to enable usage of Variables, including the {{}} syntax and [[]] syntax.

• [[VARIABLE]] can now be used for HTTP Call Parameters

• {{Dimension}} or {{Measure}} now can be used for both name and value in HTTP Call Parameters

• {{Dimension}} or {{Measure}} use the data from the table

• [[SECURE_VARIABLE]] are submitted via the request unreplaced (can see it from the network), while the value received by the target system should get the replaced result. This allows making use of Secure Variables to set the credentials when making an API request

When using the Editable Tables feature, previously the system didn’t return the correct status code, so it’s hard to detect what’s wrong.

This has been fixed, so now depending on the situation, the status code is returned as part of the response, and the system attempts to provide status codes and messages as good as possible. With 2 codes returned to reflect the response for each request:

• pi status code - an status code related to the pi application processing the request

• target status code - an status code returned from the target API

So after editing the Editable table and submit the request,

• If the request is successful, 200 is returned (pi: 200, target api: 200)

• If something is created by making such an API call, 201 is returned (pi: 201, target api: 201)

• If the data submitted is deemed to be invalid by the target API, 400 is returned (pi: 400, target api: 400)

• If the target API is not available, 400 is returned (pi: 400, target api: 404)

• If the target API has a system error, 400 is returned (pi: 400, target api: 500)

• If the pi application has a system error, 500 is returned (pi: 500), in this case pi wouldn’t be able to include the status code from the target API

Previously, there was a bug that occurred every 2nd time you edit any cell within a row in an editable table which some of the data values being sent to be ‘undefined’. This has been fixed so that the data values are saved properly and sent consistently.

Previously, when changing from a chart with Sorts and/or Targets to a chart type that doesn’t support them, errors may have been displayed due to the Sorts and Targets not being immediately removed. This has been resolved in this release of the Dashboard.

Previously, the renderer was adding extra blank pages when a report with a table was exported in PDF. This issue only used to happen in certain scenarios usually where the table content was higher than the size of the page. An extra space of 40px has now been reserved in the report page to make sure no blank pages are created.

Previously, users were able to create schedules and reports with iframes. We have now blocked the following 4 chart types from appearing on the dropdown menu for attachments in schedules and reports:

• Iframe

• Url Link

• Drill to url

• Drill to Category

Minutely and hourly schedules were re-adjusting to the incorrect time when running after midnight. For example, a time entered as 10:00 would be wrongly re-configured to 00:10. Now, the schedule correctly runs at the time defined by the user.

The details of an XML licence that are displayed in the ‘Licence’ tab of the configuration-tool would disappear if they had not yet been applied via the ‘Apply and Run’ option and you navigated to a different tab. These details now persist between tab changes.

Previously, the renderer was not working with self-signed or invalid SSL certificates when connecting through a HTTPS ‘Dashboard URL’. There is now a new option present under the ‘Renderer’ tab of the Configuration Tool, ‘Ignore Https Errors’, which will allow the Renderer to proceed despite the certificate errors.

Previously, you were unable to save an excel file to a database hosted on azure. This was due to some unnecessary escaping of characters upon saving. Now, ensuring that you have the database username credentials set up in the format ‘<username>@<server>’, you should be able to successfully save an excel spreadsheet to an azure database.

Previously, the url generated by the reset password link would contain ‘localhost’ rather than the appropriate hosted url. It now always generates a url taken directly from the server.

Previously, the targets for a Speedometer chart would appear outside the chart under the following conditions:

• You have multiple targets set up

• The final target defined is not the one with the highest value (i.e. target one is 100-200, target two is 0-100)

This would cause a visual glitch where the target would appear outside the chart. The targets now retain their position inside the chart under these conditions.

Previously, the Tomcat logging setting within the settings screen was set to ‘debug’ by default. It is now set to ‘error’ by default. Additionally, there was an issue where, upon changing and saving this setting, it would not save correctly and would revert back to its default setting. This has been fixed, allowing this setting to save and update correctly.

Previously, Light Bulb charts would hide their data value when this was smaller than a certain size even if it would have been perfectly legible.

Now, both Light Bulb and Traffic Light charts will display this value, on both the dashboard and in reports containing them, no matter how small they become.

Previously, if you changed your UUID license to an invalid one the encrypted licence stored in the database would be used. This hid the fact that the new licence was invalid until the encrypted one expired.

Now, if the UUID licence is invalid you won’t be able to log in and the encrypted licence will be removed from the database.

Regardless of the type of database being run, the audit data sent to the ALM when using a UUID licence would state that it was a ‘HyperSQL’ database. Now, the database type is identified and reported correctly.

Previously, the renderer would display and an error and break when an empty table was scheduled to export or was exported in single chart mode or as part of a report.

Previously, the table width ratio was not being respected when exporting tables as Word on Windows. Now, if you create a table with varied column width/ratios, the set column widths will be adhered to when exporting tables in both single chart mode and reports.

Previously, when applying a pre-select value to a date range filter when the browser’s language was set to ‘English (United Kingdom, Oxford English Dictionary spelling)’ the data was not displaying on the chart. Now, it correctly processes the language setting, and the data displays as expected.

Previously, when loading a category with a date range Category Object that contained either a default value or a value that has already been saved and you changed the ‘to’ date to a date in the past, it would not allow you to select a ‘from’ date before the previously selected ‘to’ date.

For example:

• You load the category, and the date filter has ‘from’: ‘10/10/2022’, ‘to’: ‘15/10/2022’

• You change ‘from' to '05/10/2022’

• You cannot select a ‘to’ date before ‘10/10/2022' until after you save the change and re-load the category

This has been fixed, so you can now freely update the ‘to’ date on this filter to a date in the past.

Previously, a Renderer with default settings was unable to successfully communicate with a Dashboard served over HTTPS with secure cookies and Same-Site set to ‘none’.

Previously, users were unable to update editable tables when a non-data column was present. An example of a non-data column is having a ‘where clause’ within the object that the data for this particular table is taken from.

The following chart types can now only be exported to PowerPoint and the button that allows users to schedule these charts has been removed from the Chart Viewer screen. We have disabled the buttons that allow you to schedule the following chart types, or export them as anything other than PowerPoint, from the chart viewer screen.

• Iframes

• Url Link

• Drill to url

• Drill to Category

Repository backups created through the ‘Create Backup’ button under the ‘Repository’ tab of the configuration-tool mistakenly had two adjacent dots as part of their filename. They now have a single dot as intended.

If an output message was wider than the ‘messages’ screen of the Configuration Tool, the overflowing contents would be hidden. This would happen relatively frequently as messages were rendered on a single line regardless of their length. Now, word-wrapping is applied to each message allowing them to be broken up into multiple lines as long as logical splitting points are present.