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January 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.

Here’s what we’ll cover.

Added

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.

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:

Open

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

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

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

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.

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

Fixed

Updated so that the correct API error code is returned when log in details provided are incorrect.

Updated so that newly added data tables on the connection screen don’t 100% overlap

Previously, an error was displayed on the chart in any scenario that returned IN ( ) - an invalid SQL statement. In such a case, the chart is supposed to show no data.

This has been changed, so a IN () statement has been converted into a IS NULL AND IS NOT NULL statement to force no data.

When category filters are set to be displayed on the top with many filters, now a scroll bar is presented for easier navigation.

Fixed Card chart editing screen, so that fonts, font colours and other drop down panels appear in front of other UI elements.

Fixed drill to charts, so that conditions defined to compare values with measures are working.

Resolved an issue with the application URL being incorrect when using a proxy server or a load balancer. This includes the forgotten password link, embedding chart link, embedding anonymous chart link, OpenID Connect link and logging out. The URL now contains the correct protocol and host, reflecting the proxy server/load balancer settings.

Fixed an issue with the dashboard not removing services or restarting certain services if there is two or more dashboards running in the parallel and if one of them had an installation directory renamed.

An issue with an exported PDF report still showing padding even when the padding is set to 0 has been resolved. The exported PDF report now reflects the settings set for padding in the report configuration panel.

Fixed an issue with the merged tables missing part of its content when exported as a PDF in both single chart mode and as a part of a report. The exported merged table now contain all the rows, spanning across multiple pages, if a large table was created. This also fixes an issue with the preview of the merged tables in the reporting section.

Fixed an issue with entity codes for escaped characters (e.g. “&”) being shown. These characters are now displayed correctly.

Fixed an issue with the report filters not being applied to the merged tables and merged charts in a report. The report filter selection for the merged tables and charts will now be reflected in the report preview, report scheduling and report exporting in pdf, ppt and word export types.

Fixed a display issue where the magnifying glass search icon of the multi-picker category object filter would overlap with a selected category object if it had a multi-line name.

Fixed an issue with ‘Prevent users from using last password(s)’ settings in the global Security Configuration panel not accepting 0 values.

Some further adjustements have also been made in how we evaluate the passwords which need to be reused;

• If 0 is set, the user will not be able to reuse its current password as a new password but will be able to use any other password as an alternative.

• If 1 is set, the user will not be able to reuse its current password and 1 most recent password but will be able to use any other password as an alternative.

• If 2 is set, the user will not be able to reuse its current password and 2 most recent passwords but will be able to use any other password as an alternative.

Fixed an issue with charts appearing blank if they had multiple dimensions but only one data value to show - for example after a filter had been applied. These charts will now properly display that sole data point.

Improved the behaviour of paginated tables by detecting when the last page of data is reached - unless the number of rows on the last page matches the pagination limit that has been set - and preventing navigation from that page to pages beyond it. When the rows of data and pagination match, you will now only be able to navigate one page beyond the data when incrementing as opposed to being able to do so infinitely.

Previously, a Doughnut or Doughnut Variable Radius chart that had the “Show Data Total and Mean” Attribute option selected and no data to display would have two overlapping messages: The “No data to display message” and the “Total: 0” message. Now, if there is no data then only the “No data to display” message will be shown.

Previously, the ‘Reload default settings’ button of the Configuration Tool UI would fail to change any of the settings on the Renderer or Scheduler tabs back to their default values. Now, the button correctly resets all of the fields of those tabs back to their defaults when pressed.

Previously, the page number within the number input of a paginated table was aligned to the left. Now, it is aligned to the centre.

Previously, merged charts would display as not having any data if one or more of the charts had data missing. Now, it merges the charts successfully and displays the chart regardless of if one or more charts have data missing.

Previously: pie, variable pie, doughnut and variable doughnut charts would stop showing the data values outside the chart, despite having the option selected, if the chart became too small. Now, the user configuration is retained and the data values continue to display outside of the chart despite its size.

Previously, when drilling down on an object with a special character in the name such as & or @, it would not drill down correctly and instead display data from all of the objects within the parent chart. Now, it drills down correctly on objects with special characters in the name.

Previously, the following directories on a windows dashboard were not being overwritten if they already existed - affecting when you upgrade on top of a previously existing installation:

• Dashboard\tomcat\webapps\panLicenceManager\

• Dashboard\tomcat\conf\Catalina\localhost\panMISDashboardResources.xml

• Dashboard\tomcat\conf\Catalina\localhost\pi.xml

• Dashboard\ExcelReader\conf.json

• Dashboard\Pirana\conf.json

• Dashboard\Scheduler\run.bat

• Dashboard\Resources*

All of these locations are now updated regardless of whether or not they existed before.