We have a fresh new cycle that’s rolling out now. 🌄
The Blyde River Canyon in South Africa is one of the largest ‘green’ canyons on earth. It features rich vegetation, wildlife, and interesting rock formations, making it one of the country’s most breathtaking sights.
Our next Appenate release cycle is similarly diverse, as you’ll see below 😉
Dynamic Choices in Forms (Going Live Soon)
Currently, you can populate a Choices field using a static list of options or with rows from a Data Source.
With this new feature, you’ll be able to generate Choice field options directly from other fields and data in your Form. The same will be true for a Table field. You’ll be able to auto-load rows in the Table from another Field in your app.
Let’s say you have a Form with a REST field which calls out to a web service. The service returns a JSON response containing a list of unique ticket numbers and titles. This new feature will enable your Form to auto-load that ticket data into a Choices field, allowing the user to pick a specific ticket to work on.
Another useful scenario: a Form which asks the user questions and then dynamically populates a Choices field with a list of their earlier answers.
We think this feature will prove super powerful and can’t wait to see what you do with it!
Better Generic PDFs (Live)
We’ll be the first to admit that our Generic PDF template is pretty bland. Let’s face it – there’s a lot of grey backgrounds and has a very simple (boring?) horizontal layout.
It’s high time that we improved this area to let you generate better looking PDF outputs without needing to go fully into our custom Word/Excel template approach.
We’ve now added new options for generic PDF outputs, namely “App Layout” and “Smart Layout”.
App Layout will produce PDFs that are modelled on how your Form displays to users on the app. If a field has a blue background and is horizontally laid out, then it will appear as such in your PDF.
PDFs generated using the Smart Layout option will initially be similar to the App Layout in nature, however we plan to evolve this over time to provide a more print-friendly layout. This will include some fuzzy logic to auto-size and stack images to display better, as well as much better page breaking and handling of tabular data. Effectively this option is aimed at giving you a more professional looking layout that is tailored to the answer data received from each Form entry.
Faster Form Testing (Live)
With V6 taking up a significant chunk of time last cycle, this feature spilled over from our Ushuaia release to now form part of Blyde.
With this feature, you’re able to turn off required fields on your Forms when in Test status. We expect this will make testing of your designs faster and simpler, thus accelerating your ability to get new and changed Forms into production.
“Switch Context” User Permission (Live)
This one is geared toward our Enterprise Toolkit and Vendor users. In the past, Read-Only or Write-Only users couldn’t switch between Environments. With this feature, you can assign a new permission to such users allowing them to do so.
If a user needs to download data entries from multiple environments – but not be able to edit things – this feature saves time. Instead of logging into each individual environment, the user can now simply switch contexts and get the information they need.
Improvements
That’s all for new features. Let’s take a look at how we’re tweaking existing features for the better.
Add Invited Users When Auditing (Live)
With this feature, we now allow user auditing to include tracking of invited users.
This will simplify tracking of user lifecycles on our platform going forward.
API – Last Device Activity (Live)
We’ve added a “Last Activity” date property to the User API. This will expand the information you can get from the API, which currently only includes hardware, OS, and app version.
API – Creation Date And Created By (Live)
Handy for our Vendor and Consultant customers, you’ll now see “Created” and “Created By” properties on our Company GET endpoint.
This means you’ll be able to stay on top of free trials and retire users on the correct dates, should the need arise.
Midway Through 2022
We’re already past the year’s midpoint – can you believe it? (And just like that, it’s almost September!)
Here’s hoping the above cycle will add extra speed to your Appenate solutions.
For any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us at customer@appenate.com.
All the best for the rest of 2022. ✊