Beta/Early Access to V4.0.4

Hello Thierry,

That would be a great idea. I would be interested in participating. If we do have bugs to report, do we report them in this forum like usual? Kindly let me know.

Cheers.

Iram

We will post instructions within a day or 2 for accessing the beta site.  I will also post what's new and available.

For reporting things, we will use this forum this time around.  Next release, we will have a dedicated forum.

We will keep it simple: I would suggest to prefix postings with [beta 4.0.4].

Thierry.

To all who registered an interest in participating in the early access program:

By now, you should have received an email inviting you to Rollbase early access.  The email was sent to the address associated with your progress id.  You should login using your progress id password.

We have created one tenant per beta customer.  Please, go ahead and try your application.  In next post I will details some of the changes in the release.

Sorry for the delay in getting this rolling.  We had to sort out multiple issues that got us delayed more than we had anticipated.  Needless to say, the V4.0.4 beta release will be quite short.  But the good news is that we are now in a better position for next release and we certainly will provide access much sooner to V4.0.5 beta (Release planned for January).

Thierry.

Here is an outline of some of the V4.0.4 changes:

Admin Controls for designing/adapting some UI components to specific device

Top Level Menus   

Top level menus (a.k.a tabs) can be configured per device now i.e a tab can be made visible specific to a device (Desktop, Tablet , Mobile). 

In the tab edit page,  a new category called "Show in" is added where user can select any of the devices on which that particular tab can should be visible in.

Once selected the user selection can be also be seen in the tab view page.

Sections

Similarly, the same configuration UI is available for sections. User can now select which devices a section should be visible on (See the section properties in page designer).

Buttons

Again, similar to Tabs and Sections,  custom buttons can be configured to be used on all devices or specific devices (It can be viewed and modified in button view and buttons edit pages respectively).

Usability and Performance Improvements

We are now supporting more Ajax Requests instead of full page reload.  This improve the performance on client side (faster load and less data transferred) and on server side (better scalability).

The list of actions where we now do Ajax Requests instead of full page reload:

• Top level menus navigation
• Viewing a record (from grid to object view)
• Navigating back to Grid from viewing a record (From Object View, toolbar back to list button)
• Viewing Next and Previous Record (From Object View, toolbar next and previous records buttons)
• Editing a record (From Object View, toolbar Edit button) - Note: Save is a full page reload

Transition - Client-side options

As this is a new navigation pattern for end-users, we have client-side options to enable/disable Page Navigation using Ajax. This is helpful considering custom end-user scripts may be written against a specific behavior like document.ready event to customize a page after it is rendered. Such end-user customization could now be affected & with client-side options to enable/disable this feature, users will have time to absorb this change & make required corrections.

To disable Page Navigation using Ajax, set this property as false:

• rb.newui.options.applicationPage.ajaxNavigation = false. 

To selectively disable particular navigation flows:

• Navigating between object records: rb.newui.options.objectViewPage.recordNavigationAjax = false
• Top level Menu (tabs) navigation: rb.newui.options.tabMenuLink.ajaxNavigation = false

Masked fields and KendoMaskTextBox widget

User can define an input mask for TextInput & PhoneInput fields which will dictate & enforce a pattern of characters. Eg. An input mask defined as (###)##-####, will only allows numerals grouped as (999)88-00000.

Earlier in 4.0, users where free to enter any value & we use to apply mask only on field blur event that is when field loses focus. However, we have now bettered this approach & are now incorporating kendo masked textbox widget. This widget from kendo library restricts users to enter only those values as permitted by the mask.

Additional info on Kendo Masked Textbox Widget, also see: http://demos.telerik.com/kendo-ui/maskedtextbox/index

Filter Improvements

We have enabled the Filter option in Related List of Object View.

Controlling Advanced Filtering Capability

 We have added 2 flags to control showing/hiding advanced filter features individually.  

• rb.newui.options.filters.showBooleanOperators: to show/hide boolean AND/OR operator dropdown
• rb.newui.options.filters.showAdvancedFilterTypes: to show/hide advanced search type dropdown

When both properties are false the entire row is hidden to save vertical space.

Here is an example script customer will need to add to custom sidebar:

Updated Libraries

Hi Thierry,

Thanks for all this :)

I am trying to do some custom filtering on a dropdown list, and I saw this new capability you are describing below:

Controlling Advanced Filtering Capability

We have added 2 flags to control showing/hiding advanced filter features individually.  

rb.newui.options.filters.showBooleanOperators: to show/hide boolean AND/OR operator dropdown

rb.newui.options.filters.showAdvancedFilterTypes: to show/hide advanced search type dropdown

When both properties are false the entire row is hidden to save vertical space.

Here is an example script customer will need to add to custom sidebar:

<script id="executeBeforeUIStarts">

              rb.newui.options.filters.showBooleanOperators = true;

              rb.newui.options.filters.showAdvancedFilterTypes = false;

</script>

Can you please elaborate a bit more on what this is meant to do ? I just tried this script and can not see anything different on the pickists. might be misunderstanding something here ..

Thank you

Meryem

Meryem, thank you for trying out the Early Access build. Looking forward to additional feedback on the new features listed above .

Regarding Fitler customization, it is related to Filters that user can configure for ListView, Charts & Reports. It does not related to the Kendo DropDown List.

Independently of this Filter Customization, for Picklist in Rollbase, we are now setting 'contains' filter as default & using kendoDropDownList widget instead of kendoCombBox.

This is related to the grid filters.  Grid filters have a dropdown for specifying AND/OR criteria and and advanced filter type dropdown.  With these flags you can control if you want to show any of these 2 dropdowns.

Thierry.

Thanks Thierry and Siraj for the replies.

Siraj, regarding Rollbase picklist, does this mean there will be no comboBoxes? Means all picklists (RB picklists and lookup picklists) will be KendoDropDown Lists ?

I am asking that, because we are now doing a lot of KendoComboBox manipulation ...

Cheers,

Meryem

Lookup Fields were already kendoDropdownList.

For Relationship Cardinality > 1,  it was kendoMultiSelect.

Also, MultiPicklist was kendoMultiSelect.

Only for Picklist,  it used to be kendoComboBox & there were many open issues around it. Hence, we decided to switch to kendoDropdownList.

If you are working with kendo widgets, request you to always access them as:

rbf_getFieldContext(fieldIntegrationName).getKendoConfig().

Only statements like inputEl.data('kendoComboBox') will have compatibility issues.

Yes exactly. These are the compatibility issues we will have now..

I absolutely understand what you are explaining, but when we want to achieve something not provided in the RB API, we simply work around it by getting to the DOM elements and basically working with Kendo widgets directly. Also we got to know about rbf_getFieldContext just a month ago I think, so we are using it in only very few places for the moment.

I will start a new thread about the comboBox issues to explain what we will need to port to DropDownList.

Thanks

Meryem

Rollbase v4.0.4 early-access subscriber:

We plan to shut down Rollbase sandbox-prod environment on Tuesday, December 15th at 11:00 am ET. We have released Rollbase v4.0.4 on December 12th, 2015 and is available on our Hosted Cloud platform (link) and private cloud (link).

We will continue to use the same environment and start it up again for early access program before our next schedule release.

Stay tuned!