Releases/Spring 2023

The Spring 2023 release (16.0) was released on March 28, 2023.

• Preview: What improvements to expect in this year’s first release Blog
• Spring Update 2023: Reports in Dynamics, support for virtual tables, data mapping, UI overhaul, and much more Blog

Questionnaires

Data mapping in bulk

In the last release of 2022, we introduced data mapping. For each question, designers of questionnaire templates could set up a binding to an entity field and either populate the answer or save the answer to the field.

In this release, you can now create mapped questions in bulk. The workflow is slightly different. First, select a linked entity; next, select fields. The appropriate questions of the matching type will then be added to the questionnaire template. Data mapping is enabled automatically for these questions, along with custom business logic that hides the questions if the questionnaire is not linked to a suitable record.

Multiple images limit

You can now add up to 100 images to a multi-image question.

Multiple images display

Image Fit is a new image grid parameter for the questionnaire and report that allows you to specify how images are resized to fit the container.

• Use Contain to preserve the aspect ratio and resize to fit the given dimensions.
• Use Cover to preserve the aspect ratio and fill the container, clipping portions that don't fit.

Reports

Image size

When designing reports, you now have more control over image dimensions. Report Designer used to allow to specify the width of the column and the height of the row where the image is placed. With this release, you can switch to custom Size and specify Width and Height directly in the image properties. Plus, the actual image has its own dimensions. How do these settings interact?

• The golden rule is: lower value applies. Essentially, treat the dimensions as upper limits.
• Aspect ratio is always preserved.
• Images are never upscaled.

Easy access to variables

All built-in and user-made variables are now listed in the left pane when editing a report. You no longer need to remember the exact syntax and type them in - you can drag them to your report.

Report preview

Reports previewed in the designer now appear in a modal window.

More control over page size

If you need to set up a custom page size for your report, you can now use inches or millimeters instead of pixels.

Clone style

The new Clone button in the style editor allows you to easily clone styles.

Woodford/platform

Nicer app UI

We're working hard to ensure that Resco mobile apps offer a nice, modern, intuitive user interface. In this release, we are bringing the following improvements for forms:

Move field labels to the top border

The traditional look of a form tab is field label on the left, field value on the right. Other positions can be configured using styles. In this release, we're introducing the BorderTop position that you might know from Google's Material Design.

Move expand/collapse toggle

The button for expanding or collapsing a form tab was moved to the right side (thumb zone).

Better access to view selector

On associated/unrelated lists, we have decreased the font size of the entity and increased the font size of the selected view. This also increases the active area where users must tap when switching to a different view.

Form designer UI overhaul

The form designer in Woodford has been overhauled.

• The Properties pane has been reorganized, some obscure properties renamed, tooltips adjusted.
• The Designer pane now acknowledges the existence of the left and right form panels (these apply to flexible forms only).
• The new Tabs pane and improved Fields & Components pane now lists all the items you can add to your forms.
• Toolbar has been reorganized. Most notably, the Edit button has been renamed to Commands.

Calendar: week selector

A tiny improvement with significant impact — if your organization relies on calendar week numbers. Users can now quickly change which week in the year they want to see.

Particularly useful if you align your first day of the week and the first week of the year settings with your organizations.

Form localization improvements

Several improvements and fixes are coming when localizing various form components.

• When localizing form tabs or buttons, spaces in the names no longer cause localization problems.
• The Change Localization button now uses localization cache and is much faster.
• When localizing buttons, Woodford now asks whether you want to localize the click text or the label. Remember that labels are generally not used with buttons (they are hidden in styles). Therefore, in most scenarios, you probably want to choose and localize the click text.

Design Size button removed from view editor

We have removed the Design Size button from Woodford's view editor. This button was used to define the size of a view row. However, the pre-defined sizes are obsolete. Use Width and Height if you need to specify custom view proportions.

Sync download performance tips

The download phase of synchronization is now summarized in the sync log in more detail. When you enable Diagnostic Sync Logs, the log includes information about the download of each entity. More importantly, it contains hints about configuration changes that can increase performance. These configuration changes should be performed in Advanced sync setup (sync config). We have also prepared a new wiki article explaining how to understand the new log entries and, more importantly, how to update the sync config and increase sync performance. See Deep dive: Sync download optimization.

<Downloader CacheSize=250MB UsedCache=251MB PausedFor=40%/>
  14:56:16 businessunit: 611 recs, 422ms
  14:56:16 systemuser: 18371 recs, 10984ms, 296ms/270K/page | Increase page (now 500)
  14:56:31 xxx_registrationgroup: 328500 recs, 293422ms + pause 83812ms, 446ms/504K/page | Increase page (now 500)    <<<< SAVING
  15:00:09 xxx_document: 14500 recs, 18124ms + pause 142329ms, 614ms/633K/page | Increase page (now 500) | Aborting
...

At the same time, we have increased the default download cache sizes.

• In the case of the Windows application, the default cache was doubled from 250 to 500MB.
• For the store apps (iOS/Android/UWP), the default is 200MB (up from 10-50MB, depending on device parameters).

This change should increase sync download performance even for users who do not want to finetune the sync config.

Rich text tab and process flow tab technology change

Before this release, the process flow and rich text form tabs used to be implemented as iframes. I.e., their code resided in the Offline HTML section of the app projects. In this release, the code was moved to where code belongs. Once you upgrade to Woodford 16.0 or later and publish your app project, the change happens automatically. No action is necessary.

There's a catch. If you are publishing your app projects with older Publish Version to ensure compatibility with older app releases, these two tabs won't work (and prevent publish) unless you perform some extra configuration steps.

Windows 8.1 app support change

The Microsoft Store edition of Resco mobile apps is no longer supported on Windows 8.1. You can use the desktop edition instead; it remains supported.

Guides

Statistics dashboard

Last release, we have added the collection of guide usage statistics to the app. In this release, we are adding a dashboard that visualizes collected data. You can learn about:

• Most popular guides (how often / how long were the guides displayed)
• Most curious readers (who opened most guides)

Add comments to steps

Users can now comment on every single step in the guides. Guide editors can review the comments in the library, accept or decline the comments, and even reply to the comment authors.

Multiselect

Managing guides is now easier than ever. Select multiple guides and perform actions in one click. For example, export multiple guides to one zip file.

Resco Cloud

OneDrive storage for Resco Cloud blobs

Database space can be expensive. In Resco Cloud, you can use external storage for binary documents to save database space and money. Since this release, you can use your OneDrive to store binary documents. See Blob storage for Resco Cloud.

Azure Cosmos DB storage for server audit data

Audit data can grow large. In order not to overwhelm your organization's database, it is now possible to store audit data in the Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. You can either use the Cosmos database provided by Resco or your own. See Server auditing for more information.

Dataverse/Dynamics

File columns support

In this release, we are adding basic support for File columns. To learn more about this feature in Dataverse, see Microsoft documentation.

What is supported in Resco:

• File and Filename fields are now visible in Woodford. You can enable them in your projects.
• When added to a form tab, the File field is represented as lookup with a label and a clickable filename.
• File fields are read-only. It is not possible to modify or upload files using Resco mobile apps.
• Standard document operations such as Print, Export, Email can be used.
• File fields are not part of the synchronization process. The file is downloaded and cached when a user opens the field on the form. The next time the file is opened, it is loaded from local storage. When the file changes on the server, it is redownloaded when the user opens the field. This behavior is the same in both offline and online modes. This means that a working internet connection is required when accessing the file for the first time.

See this page for additional information about current limits and restrictions.

Reports on backend

Use the new Resco Reports connector (pending approval) to create Power Automate flow and generate reports directly from Dynamics (or other Dataverse-based systems).

Virtual entities

Virtual tables (also known as virtual entities) enable the integration of data residing in external systems by seamlessly representing that data as tables in Microsoft Dataverse, without replication of data and often without custom coding^{(Microsoft documentation)}.

With this release, virtual entities can also be used in Resco mobile apps, both online and offline. By default, they use full sync, but if you select a proper "Modified On" field, you can enable different sync strategies. They remain read-only.

Permissions change

Microsoft is retiring Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Graph in favor of Microsoft Graph. This impacts the permissions required to run Resco mobile apps. Users might be required to relog or re-grant consent. Tenant administrators can proactively grant consent on behalf of mobile users. See Deprecations for more information.

Use organization setting for week numbering

Countries use different standards for how the first week of a year is determined. The existing Calendar Week Rule parameter in Woodford project configuration is now supplemented with a new parameter called Use organization week settings. It allows you to clone the settings of your Dynamics organization. In Resco mobile apps, this setting affects the behavior of the calendar.

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