Server Enhancements

VAIL

• Services can declare event types which are used to describe events that are either produced (aka “outbound”) or consumed (aka “inbound”) by the service.

Assemblies

• Developers can now create, publish, and install Assemblies. Assemblies are reusable Vantiq Projects that are configurable and customizable to each user’s individual requirements. Assemblies may be published and installed via the Vantiq Catalog. Please refer to the Assembly Users Guide for a complete description of Assemblies and the Assembly Tutorial for examples of how to use Assemblies.

CollaborationType Builder

• Incompatible change: The InitiateCollaboration initialTrigger property has been deprecated and replaced with inboundResource, inboundResourceId, and condition, similar to App EventStreams. Existing Collaboration Types will still run, but when updated the initialTrigger value will need to be replaced with the new properties.

App Components

• Incompatible change: The signature of the generation procedure has changed. The first parameter is now a collaborationType object (not a string Name). Any existing generation procedures for App Components will have to be updated to the new signature. Using the old signature will cause a generation error.

App Builder

• The deprecated groupBy property has been fully removed and is no longer allowed on any tasks. SplitByGroup must be used instead.
• Each App now generates an associated App Service which provides access to the App’s state and related functionality. The service declares event types representing the events that are consumed and/or produced by the App. Use of any of the following Activity Patterns causes the service to be stateful: AccumulateState, ComputeStatistics, and CachedEnrich.
• The Statistics activity pattern has been deprecated and should be replaced by ComputeStatistics.
• A SplitByGroup task cannot be used beneath another SplitByGroup task. This was not supported and now will get an explicit error during generation. If a second SplitByGroup is needed, the app with the first SplitByGroup needs to publish an event to another app or stream that contains the second SplitByGroup.
• A Join task cannot be used beneath a SplitByGroup task. This was not supported and now will get an explicit error during generation.

Catalogs

• Assemblies can be published and installed through the catalog.
• Types in catalogs may now be updated. The new type’s fields must have all the fields in the catalog type, and may have new, non-required fields. See Catalog Reference Guide
• Permissions on each catalog operation can be set for each member. See Catalog Reference Guide

CLI

• It is our general policy that the CLI is only guaranteed to work with servers of the same version. The export command for the 1.32 CLI is explicitly incompatible with previous versions.

Resources

• Metadata for access tokens is now visible to all admins. The token string is only visible to the creator.

Management and Deployment

• Management of External Lifecyle (e.g. for Connectors) has been enhanced. New Deploy capabilities are provided for defining probes and fetching file contents from Vantiq resources. See the Resource Guide for details.
• A new FetchLogs operation has been defined on installations. See the Resource Guide for details.

UI Enhancements

Modelo

• Modelo supports creating, updating, publishing and installing of Assemblies, which are a special kind of Project that can be reused in other Projects. Assemblies allow developers to construct reusable solutions that can be integrated into Projects with a minimum of configurable properties to easily extend new Project functionality. Please refer to the Assembly Users Guide for a complete description of Assemblies and the Assembly Tutorial for examples of how to use Assemblies.
• The IDE Navigation Bar has a new icon to show the number of resources with compilation errors found in the current namespace. Clicking the icon opens the Compilation Errors Pane listing resources with compilation errors. This icon is hidden when no compilation errors exist.
• The Service pane supports Service Event Types from its Events tab. Service Event Types are used to trigger events on other resources (e.g. Sources, Topics, Types) to decouple the implementation of an event from its producer and consumer. For details about Service Event Types, please refer to the Service Event Types section of the VAIL Reference Guide. In addition, the App Services Tutorial provides examples on how to use Service Event Types.
• Catalog administrators can now specify custom permissions for various Catalog operations (e.g. publish, subscribe, install) for both the Catalog itself and any member Namespaces. More details are in the Setting Permissions of the Vantiq Catalog Reference Guide.
• The user interface used in the Management of External Lifecyle has been enhanced. See the External Lifecycle Management Guide for updates.
• Project Resource Graph arrows:
  • Existing projects – the relationship arrows for compiled resources will not show up in the graph for existing projects until they are recompiled with v1.32. These resources include Rules, Procedures, Clients, Apps, and CollaborationTypes. To rediscover the relationships and restore the arrows in the graph, re-save each resource. Then the relationships and arrows will be rediscovered. (Note that Apps and CollaborationTypes will also be regenerated with package-names for their generated code.) See also: Resource Relationship Model documentation.
  • CLI Import – the relationship arrows for Clients that are imported from pre-1.32 export files will not show up in the graph after import using the Vantiq CLI. To rediscover the relationships and restore the arrows in the graph, change the Client and re-save it. You can then save and export the project or namespace to update the exported JSON files with the rediscovered relationships.
    NOTE: If you import such clients using Modelo, the clients will be automatically updated with the rediscovered relationships.
• In previous releases the Autopsy Debugger would “decompile” the source code of a Rule or Procedure in order to show the source text and derive the variables. This would often produce a result quite different from the actual source code. (For example, indentation, braces and comments would rarely match the actual source.) In this release the debugging data produced by the server has been enhanced to allow the debugger to use the actual current source code and have more complete information about which variables are currently “in-scope”. These changes result in a different look for the Autopsy Debugger which is more consistent with other standard tools (such as the Chrome DevTools debugger). The Autopsy Debugger Tutorial has been updated to reflect these changes.
• The IDE Navigation Bar has improved responsiveness to accommodate smaller browser windows. Likewise, the VAIL Editor (for editing Procedures and Rules) has been made more responsive and now has two toolbars: the main toolbar and the debugging toolbar. The debugging toolbar is shown and hidden by clicking the button at the far right of the main toolbar and contains features such as enabling tracing and log levels.
• The VAIL Editor has improved autocompletion features to support both Stateful Services and for WHEN EVENT OCCURS ON clauses.

Client Builder

• The new “Client Components” feature allows you to create your own Widgets which will be added to the Client Builder palette. For details see the Client Components User’s Guide and the Client Component Tutorial.
• The Client Builder now supports the ability to convert one type of Layout Widget to another; this feature is accessible through a Layout Widget’s context menu.
• DataTable Widgets now support an option that allows the end user to download the data being shown in the table to a CSV or JSON file. This feature must be enabled using the “Show Download Button” option in the “Specific” section of the DataTable property sheet.
• In previous releases the client.getLocation() method was only implemented when running in a mobile device. For testing purposes this method now works in a browser as well (assuming the user has given permission to use “location services” in the browser).