Releases/Spring 2022

The Spring 2022 release (15.0) was released on March 25, 2022.

• Update preview Blog
• Spring update Blog

New "Resco" app

We are releasing a brand new mobile app called "Resco" on all platforms. Its simple name and modern demo data should make the first contact with Resco more pleasant for the end users without a CRM background. Functionally, it's equivalent to the classic Resco Mobile CRM app.

Guides

Guides, formerly an exclusive part of the resco.Houston product, are now available on Resco Cloud. You can use the classic Resco Mobile CRM to display the guides. See Guides for more information.

Inspections

Multiselect actions for Questionnaire Designer

To make the management of questionnaires, folders, and snippets easier, Questionnaire Designer now allows you to select multiple items and perform bulk actions.

• To select items, either use the Select button or hold Ctrl/Command key and click the items to select.
• The following actions support multiple items: import/export, activate/deactivate, clone, move between folders.

Disable automatic reports in Questionnaire Designer

Questionnaire Designer allows you to design fitting reports along with your questionnaire templates. These automatic reports used to be available for some time, but you now have the option to disable them.

On the data level, the definition of the automatic report is saved in the questionnaire record, in the field "autoreport"; report styles are saved in the field "reportingproperties". The content of each field is a potentially large XML file. If you're not using automatic reports, disable them to save database space and sync time.

Display all images of multi-image question

In release 14.2, we have introduced the option to answer image/media-type question with multiple images or files. With this release, you have finer control over how multiple images should be presented in the app: both in the questionnaire and in the report. In the properties of image/media questions, you can set up how many images are displayed in a row, and how many images should be displayed in total.

Set up report command

The option to configure the Run Report command using the user interface (instead of a JSON string) is now also available in the Questionnaire Designer.

Create new record from a lookup question

Inspectors in the field have complained that, when answering a questionnaire, if they encounter a lookup question where the lookup target record does not exist (for example, a new customer/account which is not yet in the database), they have to leave the questionnaire, go to accounts, create a new record, save it, and then they must restart the questionnaire. With this release, inspectors can create new records directly from the lookup question, without abandoning their questionnaire.

Reuse answers more effectively

The reuse answers feature is already available for quite some time. When answering a questionnaire, inspectors can load answers from an earlier inspection so that they don't have to enter the same information again. In this release, questionnaire designers gained a new tool for defining which answers should be offered to the inspectors for reuse. We have introduced a new set of rules called On Create. These are executed before a questionnaire instance is created. They can be used to define additional variables which can be used in the reuse fetch. This can ensure that inspectors can select from a relevant list of answered questionnaires.

Disable immediate filtering in Result Viewer

Before this release, when filtering the questionnaires in the viewer, the changes in the filter applied immediately, refreshing the list of displayed questionnaires. When setting up an elaborate filter in combination with a large number of questionnaires, this sometimes resulted in a sluggish experience. With this release, you have the option to disable automatic searching, set up your filter, and then click Search.

Export with question labels, not IDs

When exporting answered questionnaire from the Result Viewer, you can now select what to use as table header:

• Use Question name to use the logical name (ID) of the question. This option is particularly useful if you want to further process the data electronically.
• Use Question label to use the actual question label. Use this option to create more human-readable reports.

Compress selected questionnaire fields

If you create a very large questionnaire on the Salesforce backend, you can run into maximum field size limitation. To help with this problem, you can compress the largest fields of the questionnaire template:

Entity (object)	Compressed fields
resco_questionnaire	resco_rules, resco_styles, resco_reusefetch, resco_autoreport, resco_localization, resco_reportingproperties, resco_layout
resco_questionnairegroup	resco_rules, resco_repeatconfig, resco_localization, resco_reportingproperties, resco_layout
resco_question	resco_rules, resco_localization, resco_reportingproperties, resco_layout

This feature is currently available as a beta, for questionnaires with full template dependency, on the Salesforce backend. To enable compression in the Questionnaire Designer, select the top-level element of a questionnaire template and check Compress properties.

Salesforce: Additional fields for JSON serialized answers

When JSON storage is enabled, all answers are saved to a single field. If your questionnaire is very large, the field can be quite large as well. On Salesforce, the maximum length of a text field is 131,072 characters.

For Salesforce backends, we have enabled two additional fields for storing the JSON string, thus tripling the maximum size. This feature is available as a beta. No configuration necessary.

Default value for Image/Media question

You can now define one image/media file/document that's used as the default answer.

One of the less obvious implications of this feature is that it enables document roundtrip. For example, you can include a Microsoft Visio diagram in your questionnaire. The inspector taps the document and edits it in an external application. Once saved and done, the modified document automatically replaces the original default. Document roundtrip is available on Windows and Android apps.

Schedule Board: preferred time window

You can now configure a preferred time window for tasks. When scheduling a task outside of the preferred time, Schedule Board displays a warning or does not allow scheduling (depending on the configuration of this feature).

Tagged images on forms

Tagged image is a component of Resco mobile apps where you can attach tags to a background image. Tagged images used to be available on questionnaires for some time. This question type allows the inspector to take a photo/upload an image and drag predefined tags onto it. With this release, tagged images can be placed on forms as a new type of form tab. This function is available with Resco Cloud backend.

Just like in questionnaires, you start by uploading a background image. However, instead of predefined tags, you can drag related records onto the image.

Document filters for Salesforce

Document filters allow you to control which documents should be available in the app in offline mode. This feature is now also available when using Salesforce as your backend server.

Salesforce: work with archived and deleted records

With this release, you can work with archived and deleted records in Resco mobile apps. This feature can be turned on for selected objects (entities) using the checkbox Sync archived and deleted records. This setting applies to both offline and online modes. After enabling this feature, full sync is required to make all records available offline. You can use Sync Filter or View Filter on fields "isdeleted" and "isarchived" if you want to download only deleted or only archived records.

The ability to sync archived records is particularly useful for Events because Salesforce automatically archives them after one year.

Salesforce: optimized upload of multiple records

We have changed the Salesforce API for uploading records. Instead of the Batch API, we are now using the newer Collections API. This significantly saves API calls and improves upload speed if many (25+) records per entity are uploaded. You can control this behavior in project configuration, Force legacy batch upload API.

Route plan

The automatic optimization of tasks in the route plan has been enhanced with new options:

• Buffer time for visits: you can use this option to add some buffer time for the optimization process so that you are on time for every meeting (it can be used for example to count in time that you might use to move from parking to the place of meeting, or to prepare material for the meeting)
• Time increments for visit start: you can set the start of your meeting to be rounded to whole 5 minutes, 10 minutes, etc.
• Flexible visit start: choose "Prefer later" if you want to arrange the arrival time as close to visits as possible. Choose "Prefer earlier" if you prefer to leave from the previous place right after your appointment ends, or right after your day starts.

We have also improved the route plan interface:

• It now displays opening hours and meeting duration.
• It also indicates more clearly which appointments are saved and which are still added only as a draft.
• We have also improved warning signs so that users can find the source of issues faster.

Resco Cloud Integrations

The Integrations function allows you to connect your Resco Cloud organization to various systems using connectors. It now includes several new features. Some were introduced in a bug-fix release in early 2022, some with 15.0.

Mapping of lookup fields

You can map external lookup fields to local lookup fields. This includes support for composite lookups, i.e., situations where a lookup is composed of multiple fields.

Mapping of status/option set fields

You can map the external state/status/option set/picklist field to a local field, and you can also map the individual values (statuses/options). If the value mapping for imported/exported value is not defined, the Integrations tool offers 3 different handling options: use a specific value, use the default value, or throw an exception.

Mapping of external date-only and time-only fields

Unlike some external systems, Resco Cloud does not have a time-only field. However, with this release, we allow mapping two external fields (time and date) to a single local DateTime field.

Batch upload

Synchronization with external systems is now faster thanks to batch upload. Multiple changes from Resco Cloud are uploaded to an external system as one request.

Resco Cloud authentication options

We have started to expand the options on how users can authenticate to Resco Cloud web applications. In addition to the classic user name and password (with the primary email as user name), you can now:

• Select a different field as user name. (This authentication option is available also for the mobile app.)
• Log in using a one-time code delivered to the user using an email (SMS planned for a future release).
• Log in using a one-time link delivered to the user using an email (SMS planned for a future release).

These options can be enabled in the Admin Console. Go to Settings > Organization, then scroll down to Authentication.

Enterprise authentication

We are improving the authentication options for Windows Desktop and Windows Store (UWP) apps. The new Enterprise Authentication switch in the Sync window is dedicated to enterprise customers delivering managed applications over MDM. It's required when using additional authentication methods like conditional access, user certificates, or reverse proxy.

This option delegates the OAuth2 authentication flow to the default browser (which must be managed) and gets the authentication result back to the application using the app's URL scheme. Users might experience a confirmation dialog after successful login and they must confirm redirection to our app to deliver the result back to the synchronization dialog.

Woodford command-line interface (CLI)

The new command-line tool for Woodford allows you to manipulate app projects directly from the command line. With the Woodford CLI, you can automate project publishing from one environment to another and much more.

The following actions are supported:

• list project/roles
• create/import/export project
• validate/publish project

The commands support Resco Cloud and Dynamics backends.

Woodford GitHub integration improvements

We have made our GitHub integration in Woodford more powerful. You can now create branches and pull requests directly from Woodford.

Debugger port change

The port for debugging the Windows 7 version Resco Mobile CRM is changing from 9222 to 9000. See Debugging offline HTML for more information.

resco.Houston

Using PDF documents in guides

Do you already have many PDFs with instructions and are terrified of converting them to resco.Houston guides? No problem. Just include them right into the guide and make them part of the process. Optionally, add your comments, tips, or warnings so your readers don't miss anything important.

In the guide editor:

1. Add PDF files to the guide's media library (the same way as you do with images).
2. Drag a PDF to a step. The first page of the PDF will appear as an image of the step.
3. Optionally, drag it to the cover as well if you want to use it as a cover image. Or just use any other image.

When you read a guide with an embedded PDF document, an icon over the step image indicates that the step contains PDF. To read the PDF document, simply tap the image.