release notes

Universal Development Update - November 2019

Related products: Universal GUI
Universal Development Update - November 2019

Hello everyone, these past three weeks we've put the finishing touches on tasks, started with reports, added canvas navigation, and more!

As always, we've made a demo for you: try it here.

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:

  • Universal isn't actively tested on the internet browser Edge at the moment. Edge will be updated to use Chromium, which greatly changes the way it works under the hood. Once this is done, we will be testing on Edge too.
  • 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

Video control

We've added a readonly video control so now you can watch video's in Universal. It looks like this:

A video control in Universal

 

Canvas navigation

Canvas navigation is about tab pages on the highest level of your screen (we call those canvasses). Now you can switch between canvasses. You can have component and detail canvasses, just like you're used to with tab pages. It looks like this:

Canvas navigation in action

 

When you go into edit mode, the first canvas that has an editable component (i.e. a form) will automatically be activated. All other canvasses will be disabled when in edit mode.

The first tab with a form gets activated when going into edit mode (all other tabs get disabled)

You can control the visibility (regular, read only, hidden) of detail canvasses using context procedures.

Detail canvasses for now contain a button that allows you to open the detail in a new document. The next step for canvasses would be to actually load the detail in the current screen.

Tasks

We've put the finishing touches on tasks. Now you can execute tasks from the menu, and you can get a confirmation popup when executing a task.

A confirmation for a task that has been executed from the menu

 

Reports

You can now execute and view reports. They work quite similarly to the way tasks work. This is what it looks like:

A report being executed from the menu and viewed

 

User preferences

We've created a user preferences screen. This is where all user preferences will be managed. For now we've moved the theme mode (dark/light) to this screen.

You can find it here:

User preferences in the topbar

 

And it looks like this:

The user preference screen

 

We also made the topbar more responsive, on small screens the name of the logged in user moves to the overflow menu and the dropdown array disappears:

 

The topbar on small screens

 

Unit tests

In the past three weeks we've added another 65 unit test cases to the components and inner workings of Universal. This brings us up to 1131 test cases in total.

Lots of minor fixes/tasks

 

Miscellaneous

  • Universal uses only the login options from config.json when the login options on the login screen are disabled.

Technical

  • Refactored where we store the current application and how it is used. This helps us implement tasks and reports executed from the menu.
  • Upgraded our user interface toolkit, Material UI, from version 3 to version 4.
  • Use context path for executing badges
  • We no longer use the current application id when working in form fields

What we'll be working on next sprint

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

  • Creating the tree component (grouped on columns)
  • Making the breadcrumb responsive
  • Starting the ground work for charts
  • Starting the ground work for non-canvas tabs
  • Starting the ground work for showing the content of details in their tab, rather than a button to open the detail

Great job!!