Developer Blog

Appway 5.3 - Release highlights

Published May 15, 2013 by Emilie Boillat

The latest Appway release is around the corner and these are the main novelties. To see it live, you can request a demo here.

Appway Studio

ID refactoring:
- Make changes to the unique identifier of any Business Object
- Refactoring preview and impact analysis
- New version after refactoring; old states keep working
Process Engine: new “paused” state for process instances
Workspace: highlight Includes in a Screen section and directly edit them
Metadata Editor: Business Object properties editable within any Business Object’s editor
Variable Definitions: new editor for all Business Object types
User interface: large lists can be optimally filtered and displayed thanks to the introduction of Data Tables

Process Editor

New Preview tab:
- Process models are entirely interactive and walkable
- Walk token through process steps with navigation buttons or directly jump to a specific step
- Impersonation: take over a specific user’s role
New Track Point component:
- Visually define custom track points within a process
- Store tracking data in in files or to any Oracle, MySQL or MSSQL database
- Access all tracking data during process execution
- Integrates with Business Activity Monitoring and Business Process Audit extensions
Start and Intermediate Message Event components: variable declaration is now explicit
Placeholder component can be converted into Screens and Sub-Processes by right-click

Screen Editor

Improved preview:
- Random Test Data: automatic test data generator for instant screen testing
- User-based screen testing: generate screen preview based on specific user assigned to the TestUsers group
New layout managers:
- Border Layout Manager for top, bottom, left, right and center screen areas
- Grid Layout Manager for individual cell areas
New widget components:
- Portal Worklist: Workitems management with configurable columns including filtering, sorting and caching functionality and an integrated participant tracker.
- Data Table : sortable and filterable table for handling large amounts of data from Catalogs or specific script functions
- Dropdown List: searchable dropdown list allowing multiple selections
- List Box: highly configurable lists allowing multiple selections
- Tab Box: add tabs to a specific screen section
- Text Editor: rich text editor with extended formatting features
- Charts: Interactive line, bar and pie charts
Improved widget components:
- Google Map widget adapted and refactored
- Image widget now includes a mouse-over magnifying glass

PDF Output documents

Highlight form fields in color, e.g. those fields a customer is required to fill out.
Improved PDF preview: better browser compatibility and no plugin required
Optimized PDF merging for minimal document size

Data Classes

New editor for Data Class Business Objects

Deployment

Import any file (e.g. images, text resources, CSV, CSS, HTML, PDF) as a Business Object: the type is determined based on the file’s extension
Revised deployment interface:
- Better handling of large amounts of Business Objects
- Enhanced Business Object filtering
- Visual history to compare local and imported Business Objects

ScriptFunctions

Date-related functions (DATEFORMAT, DATEPARSE, PARSEDATE) now support time zones

Infrastructure

Edit starting order for extensions
Extensions start up according to the order defined and shut down in the reverse order
Faster repository start-up thanks to the use of multiple processors

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