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We are pleased to present our latest offering of pi - our October 2021 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

Rich text editing allows you to change the appearance of text by using different fonts, changing the font size and colour, applying background colours and changing the alignment. The screenshot below shows how some of the new formatting options can be used.

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The following screenshot shows the new formatting toolbar when creating/ editing a Card Chart.

Changing a font is really easy, select the text that you want to change and click the ‘Font Family’ icon to choose a new font.

Rich text editing has been added to the following areas of the dashboard:

• Scheduling screen

• Report text editing

• Report header text editing

• Card chart type

Users will be able to apply formatting to entire paragraphs of text, particular sentences or to individual words or characters.

You can see full details of this new feature here.

You can also find details of the changes affecting reports and scheduling by clicking this link and card charts by clicking this link.

In addition to the formatting options:

• Users will now be able to download a Card Chart as a Word.docx

• Card Chart types used in a report will appear when the report is downloaded as a Word.docx

Video

We’ve created a short video to explain this in a bit more detail.

The Dashboard now supports the Storage Access API that some browsers offer (currently Edge, Safari and Firefox), which allows a user to permit usage of third-party cookies for a website e.g. when the Dashboard is embedded in another website. This allows the Dashboard to work embedded even when third-party cookies are blocked as long as the feature is supported and permission is granted.

A new option, ‘Allow Unverified Security Certificates’, has been added to Dashboard Configuration> Settings which allows users to ignore a self-signed/invalid certificate.

By default, the button will be unticked which will allow for the security checks to be carried out for the certificates used.

Changed

Some extra logic has been introduced, which will now skip any excel-reader related logic if the data connection does not support the excel-reader. This change has been introduced in order to improve performance and will affect the following data connections; MYSQL, MYSQL_8, SINGLE_STORE, SQL_SERVER, FREE_FORMAT_JDBC.

The time taken to build category filter values in charts will now be visible in the dashboard.

The message that was displayed when a user clicked on a drill down level on a chart that was launching an external URL has been changed from 'External URL link has been launched (Disable pop-up blockers)' to 'External URL link has been launched'.

The --help option of the configuration tool has been improved.

Added Linux services for managing the dashboard.

Fixed

When files were exported, any Variable values such as in ‘Report for [[TODAY]]’, were not replaced in the exported file. The Variable name will now be replaced in the exported file for example, Report_for_2021-10-02.pdf.

The old import-export link in ‘More Options’ will no longer be visible when installing a slim-docker build. Users will be able to access it directly (if they still use it) when installing the full fat docker build.

Card Charts that contain text but no data were not being displayed correctly when saved.

The path error which was shown in the configuration tool logs when the repository was being restored from the file path will no longer appear.

When a report that contained a Card Chart was exported to Word, the Card Chart was not being displayed correctly.

When a legend item containing a numeric value was recoloured and the chart then filtered on this value no data was being displayed.

All Environment Variables should now be correctly applied. This specifically affected containerised and AMI deployments.

Keeping An Eye On pi