Open

November 23

We are pleased to present our latest offering of pi - our November 2023 product release! This page helps summarise the areas of the dashboard we have Added, Changed, or Fixed meaning you can make a quick and informed decision on when to upgrade to the latest release.

Here is what is included in the release.

Product Release

Added

Added functionality that allows to select the mode in which you wish to select the default value for the drop list category object type.

‘Default Value Mode’ dropdown has been introduced with ‘Text’ mode set as a default. The dropdown will provide an option to set the mode to ‘Index’. The ‘Index’ option provides the users with an ability to specify the index value by which they wish to select an item from the drop list; index starts at 0. E.g. if the options are 'Test', 'Dev', 'Sales', then index 0 is 'Test', and index 2 is 'Sales'

The changes apply to drop list category object type and can be applied to category objects and report filters.

Open

See our Category Objects page for more information.

Previously, the Logging Level for the Dashboard (and Tomcat) could only be set through the Dashboard UI. Now, those settings have been removed and the Log Level can instead be set through the Configuration Tool. On the GUI, the setting can be found in the ‘Logging’ section of the ‘Tomcat’ tab. It can also be set through a new Environment Variable : “PI_TOMCAT_LOGGING_LOG_LEVEL” to one of these values: ERROR, WARN, INFO, DEBUG.

Previously, the colour modal that would set Text/Background Colour in Card Charts and Reports only displayed some Default colour options. Now, all of the custom colours that have been defined for the active theme are also shown. On the screenshot below, “colour3” is the custom name of the currently hovered over item:

Add ‘use ssl’ option for configuration to enable a connection to an external MariaDB repository instance.

• PI_DB_USE_SSL is the environment variable (configurable for docker)

• ‘useSsl’ under ‘database’ is the configurable property in dashboard.json

• Checkbox added to config tool GUI

• Will update tomcat’s pi.xml file, migrations, excel reader and scheduler connections

• Don’t have to supply any certificates to the client side for now

• Does not work on windows - only available on Linux and Docker

• Only works with mariadb as the repository

• Only works when using an external DB

With the exception of Multi series and Analytics Chart Types, the Colour Tab of the Chart Editor has been updated to use the new Colour Picker as previously implemented for Card Charts and Reports. Below you can see what it looks like both when not currently selecting a colour (Colour Tables) and after you have opened the Palette by clicking the Colour Button (Dashboard Charts)

Text Colour can now be conditionally formatted for Table Chart Types in the same way as Background Colour. Each Colour Condition that you set can now govern one or both of these styling elements. It is also possible to set either/both of them to ‘null’ as shown in the image below where certain ‘Colour Buttons’ appear white with a red, diagonal line through them.

In cases where a condition is overriding a previous one, having one of the two styling elements set to ‘null’ would allow the style from the previous condition to be used instead. Examples of this behaviour can be seen in the 9th row from the screenshot below where the “Chart Name equal to No Default Layout“ condition overrides the Purple background of the “Chart Category Description equal to Colour Tables” but, due to having the Text Colour set to ‘null’, allows the silver Text Colour to still be active. In that example, the first column retains its purple Background Colour as the condition is more specific to that cell that the “Apply colour to whole row” of the other one - this is in line with the previous behaviour.

‘Showed Category Objects’ is the new audit type that has been added to mis_audits table to record the category object filters applied to the category being displayed. The record will record category ID (mis_audits.detail_info), category name (mis_audits.description), usercode (mis_audits.user_code), timestamp (mis_audits.audit_date_time) and category filters (mis_audits.category_filters) in the string format.

Example:

This task is to implement the ability to retain filters with unreplaced Objects in the SQL when a Chart is displayed. We implemented this in August (25431) at the chart level, while this time it’s on the data connection level.

If this is set to true (the checkbox is ticked), regardless if it’s set on the Chart level or the Data Connection level, a Chart would retain filters with unreplaced objects in the SQL statement.

Retain filters with unreplaced objects in SQL means,

• If a chart has a filter and turn on “Manually apply category filters“, which results in e.g. REGION = ‘{{Region}}’

• And when e.g. putting this chart into a category, and nothing in this category can replace {{Region}} to a value

• Retain filters would just keep the statement REGION = ‘{{Region}}’, which generally ends up having no data to display for this chart

• The default behaviour inherently would not retain such a filter, but if a user intentionally applies such a setting on a data connection, it implies that showing “no data“ is intended for charts with such setup.

Changed

To resolve newly reported high level vulnerabilities in Tomcat, we have upgraded to 8.5.95.

To keep our software stack up-to-date we have migrated our code to Grails major version 5.

To resolve reported vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-32697) we have upgraded MySQL, SQLite and PostreSQL drivers and removed XPack and Firebolt.

To resolve a newly reports, high level vulnerability in the MySQL-Connector we have upgraded it to the latest version (8.2.0)

Numerous improvements made to the performance and styling of Excel exports, by changing the library that was used in the dashboard. New Excel export implementation still supports Chart level styling, theme level styling and table conditional formatting for background colour.

Fixed

Previously, the “Reload last used…” button at the top of each tab of the Configuration Tool GUI was appearing as disabled, even when it should have been enabled.

On a database missing the RECORDTABLEINTERACTION procedure, some migrations could fail to work. This has been resolved by moving the migrations that create that procedure, so they are always run.

The prompt to inform about storage access (used when cookies are blocked in supported browsers) was shown in a scenario where it was not usable.

Entries into the ORDER BY field of objects was not affecting charts correctly when "Use SQL alias in GROUP BY and ORDER BY" was selected in the data connection. This was due to the alias not being included in the SELECT, ORDER BY and GROUP BY statements as needed.

"Use SQL alias in GROUP BY and ORDER BY" is now an option on all data connection types, and the alias is now added to the relevant clauses in the SQL as needed.

Addressed an issue when data connection import was removing the charts from the reports where the exported charts were used in the reports had changes in them.

When using ‘Show Data Values’ and ‘Show Data Percentage’ in the chart editor for percentage stacked charts, the values will be displayed correctly within in the chart.

Previously, when importing a schedule which doesn’t already exist in the system, the list of schedules would not automatically reload, and you would only be able to see the schedule added after refreshing the page. You now see these immediately see that the schedule has been added to the system.

Known Issues

Rotated Tables do not handle Additional Data well resulting in missing rows and therefore broken colour conditions.

Special characters are displayed encoded for the export file name, chart title and subtitle in the Excel export. This only applies to a single chart mode export and will be fixed in the upcoming releases.

User accounts are not automatically being disabled when their expiry date is met currently on the User Login screen. The message that appears on the User Login screen should return a message that details the User has been disabled, but currently does not. User accounts can still be disabled manually to overcome this issue. A resolution for this will be included in our January 24 release.

Schema Changes