Say hello to our Uluru Update, named after the famous icon of Australia’s red centre!
CC by Paul Arps
As usual, the Windows preview is expected to become available roughly 2 weeks after iOS is released.
The new app version number (as seen in the bottom right of the app’s Settings screen) ends in 4.95 for Android & iOS, and ends in 5.55 for Windows, so keep an eye out for app updates!
New REST Field
Our team is super excited about this one! We’re adding new field type to Forms that enables you to issue a REST request in JSON or XML to an external web service. The result of the request is stored in the REST field, and you can then access the result’s values through our existing JSONVAL() and XMLVAL() formula functions.
Being able to pull data from pretty much any API, directly into your apps, is something we’ve wanted to offer for ages, and the REST field is a big part of making this happen. We can’t wait to see how you use this and plan to keep improving this field based on your feedback.
The ability to leverage REST responses is also expected to make its way into other platform areas in the future – we’re just getting started with this feature!
Better Notifications
We’re giving the notifications area a facelift to better handle many notices and provide more information about failures and other reports currently displayed in notices.
There is more planned for this area in our next release – including emailing of errors (yes, its finally coming!)
Custom REST Connectors
Website as a Service (WaaS) customers can now define up to 3 custom Form connectors, using our REST connector as the basis. The connectors you define will appear in the Connector selection dialog when your users want to add connectors to their Form designs.
This opens up the ability to further embed branding into your WaaS site and also allows you to provide a more seamless experience when integrating users with other services or your other external offerings.
Head over to the Customise Site page found off the Branding Center area of the web portal to see the new Custom Connector configuration options, which are live and ready for use right now!
Windows App Notifications
To date, our Windows app has not provided support for receiving notifications from the platform – e.g. when a new Task is assigned to a user. This will be changing in our Uluru release, as we now add the ability for the Windows app to run in the background (desktop tray) and to receive and popup notices as they arrive.
Bug Fixes and Minor Improvements
- Improve app logins to allow the same username and password combination to be used across organisation accounts
This introduces a new “organisations” drop-down on the app password entry screen, which allows the user to choose “Other…” if they want to log into an organisation that they have not previously accessed from their device.
Users that only belong to one organisation can ignore the organisation drop-down and proceed with normal login. - Don’t save Form entry when doing a Force Sync and Form settings explicitly don’t save changes.
- Fix image annotation button placement on iPhone X
- Show a more appropriate message when user trying to log into web portal does not have the rights to do so
- Improve validation summary to show Action button text when invalid/required
- Fixes to Android compatibility issues in Android 7 and 8
- Fix to filtering issues with Choices fields in particular scenarios
- Improve Force Sync for specific device usage cases
We have high hopes for this new release, particularly the REST field, as the features being released offer significantly more value and options to existing customers. Keep an eye out for your new app versions arriving in the respective app stores real soon, and let us know what you think!
PS: What Happened to Populating a Table from a Data Source?
Unfortunately the preview of this release revealed some issues with this feature that we need to resolve before it can be considered production quality.
Our team is working on this currently and we hope to add the feature back into our next release in November.