Our development cycle running from April to July 2019 gets its name from Surin Beach in beautiful Phuket, Thailand.
This place holds fond memories for our team as it was the site of our most recent company retreat 🙂
CC by Jpatokal.
This cycle is focused on adding new Connectors and further enhancements to our Tasking functionality. There’s also a stack of smaller improvements as well as our usual bug fixes and other maintenance items.
These changes have now been rolled out to all customers. You can also check out these changes on our Tap-to reference app, found in Google Play, Apple App Store, and for Windows. The new app version number (as seen in the bottom right of the app’s Settings screen) ends in 4.98 for Android & iOS and ends in 5.58 for Windows.
New: PowerBI Connector for Forms
Microsoft PowerBI has emerged as a great choice for reporting and dashboarding in businesses, so we figure this is a perfect fit for your Appenate data 🙂
We’re adding a new connector which enables you to push Form entry data into a PowerBI dataset. This new feature will work very similarly to our Google Sheets connector, automatically creating and maintaining the dataset, freeing you to build business intelligence reports and visualisations via PowerBI’s myriad options.
We plan to provide more integration options for PowerBI in the future, particularly around the concept of embedded dashboards, so stay tuned for more in the future!
New: Google BigQuery Connector
As part of our focus on database connectivity, we’ll be launching a new set of connectors for Google’s BigQuery service.
Much like our SQL Server connectors, you’ll be able to plug data from BigQuery tables into Data Sources, as well as pushing data to BigQuery via Form and Task connectors.
For customers in the Google cloud world, this unlocks a bunch of new possibilities – BigQuery is a natural complement to other Google services like Data Studio and also features baked-in BI capabilities.
Tasking Upgrades
We continue to iterate and improve our Tasking functionality with the goal of providing the best possible options for job dispatch and tracking.
The following items will begin to appear on the platform during this cycle:
- New “Default User” option on Task Templates, which allows you to nominate a specific user for a task type.
- New ability for app users to reassign their Tasks to other users (provided this has been permitted via the Task configuration in the web portal)
- Support for referencing Form activity answers in Task Connector outputs.
- Across all Tasking pages, we now apply auto-filtering of “Assign To” user dropdowns when a specific User Group is specified in the “Restrict to Group” field.
- The ability for a Task created from a Template to default into Draft status (as opposed to our current default of sending the Task immediately)
- More options to edit Tasks that are completed or in progress, including the ability to change Task statuses via the web portal.
- Ability to edit preset answers on Tasks that are still in Draft status
- Added ability to filter Tasks by User Group in web portal
- Task Templates will be supported by Folders, allowing you to better organise and manage access to Templates.
- Our Repository feature will also add support for Task Templates, enabling easy copying of Templates between environments or clients.
Forms Upgrades
- REST Fields: New “Headers” option added to allow the dynamic population of REST request headers
- Date/Time Fields: New “Minute Interval” option.
This will control the time increments displayed by time pickers in Form entries, allowing you to, for example, specify that users only be able 15 minute intervals. - Action Fields: New “Reload on Return” option to completely reload a Form when the Action target returns back into the Form entry.
This will reload Data Source and Global Values, unlocking the ability to return/refresh values that may have been edited in the target Action. - Process Step Fields: You can now assign Tasks generated by Process Steps to the “First to Claim” and “First Available” system built-ins.
- Automatic Number Generation – this is also a carry-over from our Tsitsikamma cycle.
This allows unique, incrementing numbers to be reliably generated during Form entry. - Form fields that are read-only will be standardised across iOS, Android and Windows to provide a more readable user display.
Miscellaneous Other Improvements
- New “Forgot Password?” option to allow users to reset their passwords directly from the app.
This is an App as a Service level feature that is enabled via our Branding Center. - Support for the PATCH verb will be added to all REST connectors and related functionality
- Added a “URL Encoded” option to REST-based connectors
This will enable data to be sent to external services using a x-www-form-urlencoded approach. - Add RestrictToGroup property to v2 API, Task/Post endpoint
- Add User Type column to Users page in web portal
Bug Fixes and Maintenance
- Improve watermarking to handle smaller pixel resolution of images on Windows
- Watermarking is getting clipped on iOS
- Fix Table row deletion blanking out next row in certain cases
- Fix Table index going into negative in certain scenarios
- Windows: Fix Launch Screen Url Decoding Issue
- Fix issue with Invisible Fields and TOLIST() formula
- APP: Change annotation icon behaviours in iOS/Android to match Windows
- Android / IOS: Fix launching app from url without query parameters issue
- Support organisation date formatting in Listing screen sorting/filtering cases
- Fix edge case email format validation on Form Text field
- Fix issue with Form field titles not displaying when title is initially empty text, and later populated dynamically
- Fix crash with REST field on iOS and Windows when button triggers page jump
- Fix white background on annotation title and button bars in iOS (iPad)
- Add missing “Exclude from Table Display” option to REST field
- Improve data template support for Repeat HideRowIf single cell cases
- Improve user-facing Connection errors on validation to allow easier identification of root problem
- Trim all values involved in REST connectors before saving and using
- Fix edge cases issues with Password Policy enforcement