January 2023 Dashboard Release Notes

January 2023 Dashboard Release Notes

January 2023

Release Name - pi.2023_01_26

Release Date - Jan 31, 2023


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

Before upgrading, we always recommend that you take a backup of your dashboard. You can find more information here.

Before upgrading, we always recommend that you review ALL release notes, from the version you are considering upgrading from and to. This is essential should there be a material change that could impact you or your customers. Where possible, upgrading to a test instance first can be helpful.

 

Here’s what we’ll cover.


Added

Additional options added to the Configuration Tool User Interface (UI)

Configuration-Tool#96

19080

Configuration Tool

The UI for the Configuration Tool now includes more options on the ‘Repository’ and ‘Renderer’ tabs as well as two additional tabs for ‘Excel Reader’ and ‘Pirana’ settings. Whilst these options can now be set in the UI when they couldn’t before, none of them are new - as they were all previously available to be set through environment variables or by editing the configuration file (dashboard.json) directly.

 

User fields added to the Configuration Tool UI to manage Windows Services

pi#432

15283

Configuration Tool

Two new fields for User Account Name and User Account Password have been added to the Configuration Tool UI across all services tabs to manage the Windows services. The fields have also been added to default.json file with the default value of Local Service to run Windows services.

The ‘User Account Name’ field will specify the account under which the service should run. The account name should be represented in the form of DomainName\UserName. If the user account belongs to the built-in domain, you can specify the user account name as .\UserName.

New environment variables have also been added for the user name and password across different services; these can be found in the following documentation: Environment Variables

Example of the new User fields in the Configuration Tool UI for the Scheduler service:

Performance - efficiencies when displaying content, plus addition debugging messages to help diagnosing Category Objects performance

pi#1493

23827

Category Objects / Performance

Added additional debug messages to help diagnosing category objects performance. Also, implemented performance enhancement to solve slowness when data connection has lots of content.

 

Ability to align chart X and Y axis labels

pi#808

11210

Chart Display / Functionality

Within the Chart Editing Screen, options have been added to enable;

  • the text labels on the x axis can be aligned to left, centre, right

  • the text labels on the y axis can be aligned to top middle, bottom

 

Additional styling elements added to Themes

pi#825

9733

Themes

We have enabled the ability to style 2 new parts of the dashboard in themes:

  1. The titles for variable names and restrictions - these are found under the ‘settings’, ‘users’ and ‘roles’ tabs in the dashboard. You can style these with the field ‘.pi-header-label' which is found under the main 'dashboard’ tab of the themes editor.

  2. The login username & password input fields - specifically, you are now able to change the background colour. In order to do this you also have to set the key & values ‘-webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 0 30px transparent inset;’ to be able to see your background colour changes applied.

 


Changed

Linux Services - managing services with systemd

configuration-tool#99

19373, 23506

Dashboard Services

Improved the way the service status is being recorded with systemd. Any errors during the start up of the services will now be recorded in the command line while using ./configuration-tool. Also, changed the way of how the executables are called for all the services to improve the reliability.

 

Prevented sensitive values being visible in the dashboard and when using the API

pi#1443

23174

Settings Tab / API

To improve security in the dashboard, a number of values in the Settings tab have been altered so that their values are no longer visible in the dashboard. The UI will instead display an obscured value corresponding to a generic reserve password when a password is present. This generic reserve password (?-3!present!2-?) will now also be returned as the value when accessing this information via the API instead of the sensitive value.

 

The values affected include:

  • AWS Secret Access Key

  • SMTP password

  • OAuth - API Key

  • OAuth - API secret