release notes

Universal Development Update February 2020

Related products: Universal GUI
Universal Development Update February 2020

Hello everyone. It's time for another Universal development update. This sprint we've been working on the navigation tree, many stability, performance and UI issues. We've also kept working on cubes and did the groundwork for lookup popups.

As always, we've made a demo for you: try it here. Before trying it out, press 'Clear Cache' on the login screen.

We'll keep you updated regularly about Universal's progress.

Beta build

Like with every blog, we've released a beta build so you can test Universal out for yourself. Don't forget the documentation and be sure to keep the following in mind:

  • Edge has been updated to use Chromium, which greatly changes the way it works under the hood. We now also recommend this browser to be used for Universal.
  • Universal must be deployed on the same server as Indicium or it should be an allowed origin in appsettings.json.
  • Universal only works with version 2019.1 and up of the Thinkwise Platform.
  • Furthermore, make sure you run all hotfixes on the IAM and SF that you plan to use for Universal.
  • Make sure you are on the latest version of Indicium Universal.

Download your beta build here

Cube

We've added support for charts where there is no row dimension. Something like this:

Cube set without a row dimension

The resulting chart in Universal looks like this:

The resulting chart

We started doing the groundwork for pivot grids so we can implement them soon.

We now use the cube field translation rather than the column translation. And we also fixed a bug where the chart crashed when there was no data

Navigation tree

Besides the listbar, we now also support the navigation tree (tree menu). This enables developers to have multiple levels in their menu:

The navigation tree

Groundwork for lookup popups

We've come a long way for lookup popups. We added the button and the popup that loads the lookup subject. Since we have to do some finishing touches and styling, we won't show it just yet. We'll enable the buttons soon so you can see it.

Unit tests

In the past three weeks we've added another 50 unit test cases to the components and inner workings of Universal. This brings us up to 1346 test cases in total.

Lots of minor fixes/tasks

UI/UX

  • We now hide tab headers when ShowTabHeader is set to false in the SF, or there is only one component tab visible
  • We now only show the toolbar when the tab page has components that need the toolbar
  • Fixed a bug where the action bar would slide out of view on some iPads
  • Fixed a bug where the checkbox would skip over the indeterminate state when it was unchecked
  • Suggestion control options now have the correct color
  • Fixed wrong translation (sf_version should be platform_version)
  • The search overlay now can be cancelled and closed with escape and closed with enter
  • Form fields now have the width as defined in the SF by field_percentage
  • We now show the actual badge number, rather than displaying 99+.
  • The style of the 'Open documents' text is now consistent with Tab Page headers.
  • Removed hidden links in email, phone and url controls that appeared when they had no value.
  • The required asterisk for the HTML control is now also colored red.
  • The checkbox no longer moves a few pixels up when it's selected for the first time.
  • It's no longer possible to scroll the text of the tab page headers away.
  • Horizontal scrolling in the grid is now possible

Technical

  • We upgraded typescript so we can use new features when developing Universal
  • We now interpret a breakpoint of 0 as the default screen type since omitting the breakpoint would lead to problems in the future.
  • Refactored the way the application id is stored within Universal
  • Bugs that would cause a crash in production now also cause a crash in our development environment so we can see them more easily without needing to create a production environment
  • Made the build console output in our CI more readable
  • Fixed a console error that we should return an empty object rather than null

Performance

  • Refactored away a separate request to Indicium to get PK's
  • Refactored the way responsive detail tiles are calculated

Stability

  • Fixed a bug where detail tab pages were duplicated
  • Fixed a bug where tab pages had the wrong content
  • Fixed a bug that caused Universal to crash after layout procedure errors (TCP issue 74580)
  • When you open an already opened document, the screen is no longer blank
  • Fixed bug where Universal would sometimes crash when closing document (TCP issue 74813)
  • Fixed bug that the execution of layouts failed due to an unknown error.

What we'll be working on next sprint

We're working towards a version with all essential features. For next sprint this means:

  • Making lookup popups available for you
  • Doing more groundwork for the pivot grid
  • Doing research into process flows
  • Creating the first version of the tiles menu
  • Allowing fields in the form to share the same line
  • Grid: fixed columns, fixed size columns
  • Some further chart improvements