WebFOCUS 8207 Release Notes


The following topic provides all the information that you need to know about this release of WebFOCUS.

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Release and Gen Information
Release Date Gen Information WebFOCUS Server
Friday, November 8, 2019 wf111319a Gen 10* 8207 Gen 1905

*Signifies that a new package was made available.

New Features
Description

New Home Page Experience

  • Improved Search Functionality. Powered by Apache Solr, the newly redesigned search functionality allows you to quickly access content across your repository. Using a text bar found on the WebFOCUS Home Page, you can enter a search term to quickly display all content items that match that term. The interactive search engine updates the suggestions as you type. You can also see the entire list of items that match a keyword, in a comprehensive list view.
  • Enhanced Navigation of the Home Page. The new Home Page is organized into four functional views:
    • Home. Provides at a glance look at your portals, favorites, and the items that you recently created or ran.
      Note: Trial users also see the Getting Started section on their Home view, which provides access to the sample data and educational resources.
    • My Workspace. Serves as a centralized location for all your private content.
    • Shared with Me. Displays all of the content items that were shared with you or your group, by other users, or the items that were shared with all users in your environment.
    • Workspaces. Allows you to organize your repository structure, create and interact with content, create sample content, work with data, and perform other tasks. The Workspaces view is the most comprehensive component of the Home Page.
  • Quick Access to Data and Visualizations. You can now access your data and WebFOCUS Designer, where you can visualize this data, by clicking one of the quick access buttons on the Home Page. The plus, Get Data, and Visualize Data buttons are available in every view of the Home Page and provide a smooth workflow for content creation.

WebFOCUS Home Page

For More Information

For more information, see Using the WebFOCUS Home Page. 

Description

Data Preparation Enhancements

  • New Data Access Workflows. You can now access all your data from a single streamlined environment. Upload and modify data files, or connect to various data sources, configure adapters, and add or change connections. Then easily visualize your data, use it to create content, or prepare it for future analysis.
  • Search or Filter Available Data Sources. When connecting to data, you can quickly locate the adapter you need. Filter by adapter category, using the category drop-down menu or search by keyboard using the search field. 
  • Preview and Prepare Data Files. When uploading data, you can preview it before loading. This gives you the option to modify your data as needed. 
  • Automatically Deriving a Field Name When Creating an Expression. When you add a new field as an Advanced Expression or using Apply Function and enter a Title for the field, a suggested field name is automatically generated when you click outside the field or press the Tab or Enter key on the keyboard.
  • Selecting Join or Union When Dragging a Source Onto a Flow. In prior releases, in order to add a source as a union, you had to first add a union to the flow, and then add sources to it. Now, when you add an additional source to a data flow by dragging the new source onto an existing one, you can add the new source as a JOIN or a UNION by dropping it on the appropriate bubble, as shown in the following image.
  • Choosing a Join or Union for a Data Flow From a Menu. You can add a data source to a data flow as a JOIN or a UNION to existing data sources.
  • Creating and Renaming a New Folder in a Business View. In prior releases, adding a new folder to a Business View in the Synonym editor created the new folder with a default name. To rename this folder, you then had to right-click the folder, click Rename from the shortcut menu, and enter a new name.
  • Previewing the Display Format for a Function. When you create an expression using a function and change the display format of the function, you now see an example of how the field will be displayed in reports.
  • Specifying a Location for Sampling Data. When representative sampling was enabled in prior releases, the samples would be stored in a binary file on disk. Now, the samples can also be stored in relational database tables using an adapter and connection you specify as the default target for flows. You can set a target for data flows on the Workspace page by clicking Settings, then settings for Web Console Preferences, then Target Defaults. You can then select a connection and target DBMS for the ETL-TRG-DBMS parameter.
  • Staging All Sources When Sampling in a Data Flow. When sampling is enabled for a flow, even sources that are too small to support sampling are staged in the same staging target as the large sources, to eliminate cross joins and, therefore, improve join performance.
  • Profiling Numeric Data Using Standard Deviation. When using the Synonym or Flow editor and selecting a numeric field, two new data profiling statistics are available, Standard Deviation (Population) and Standard Deviation (Sample).
  • Creating a Business View for a Target Data Source. When you create and load a target table in a data flow, you can right-click the target after adding it to the flow and click Edit Business View. A default Business View is created for the target table with default folders based on the fields in the synonym. A page opens on which you can edit the Business View.
  • Improving Performance of UNION and UNION ALL in a Data Flow. The performance of the UNION and UNION ALL processing in a data flow has been improved by passing more of the union processing to the DBMS in the generated SELECT statements. This reduces the number of intermediate files generated that need to be processed by WebFOCUS after data retrieval.
  • Selecting the Type of UNION in a Data Flow. When adding a source to a data flow that already has one or more sources, you can select a union by dragging the source to the UNION bubble.
  • Pivoting Multiple Columns on Upload. When you upload a spreadsheet or delimited file with columns of repeating values (for example each column contains an amount for a year) you can multi-select columns and click Pivot to rows from the shortcut menu to transpose the columns to rows.
  • Creating a Business View for a Target Data Source. When you create and load a target table in a data flow, you can right-click the target after adding it to the flow and click Edit Business View. A default Business View is created for the target table with default folders based on the fields in the synonym.

Get Data

For More Information

For more information, see Accessing Data and Preparing Data.

Description

Visualizing Data

  • Enhanced Designer Workflows and UI. WebFOCUS Designer now includes an integrated canvas that allows you to join data, visualize that data, and arrange your new content into an interactive page, all within a single session. You can use a simple, but powerful set of tools to create new content in a variety of standard and custom chart types, and row- and column-based report layouts. You can style and customize these items individually, and transform them instantly into a page, in which you can create even more new content. You can then rearrange and add run-time behaviors to each component, and filter your content based on visual elements.
  • Filtering a Chart With Visual Selections. In WebFOCUS Designer, you can visually create prompted filters by selecting areas of a chart directly from the canvas as you create it, as well as at run-time. This is called on-chart filtering. Since on-chart filtering is performed based on visual selections on a chart, they are quick and intuitive to create. On-chart filters created from one item immediately affect all other content created on the page, allowing you to see the impact of your filter immediately. On-chart filtering is available from pages containing one or more new content items, and from stand-alone charts created using the AHTML output format.
  • Adding Static Filters to Content. In WebFOCUS Designer, you can create a static filter for a field. Static filters are always applied to your content whenever it is run, as opposed to prompted filters, which involve user selection. While prompted filters allow you to create controls when the content that uses them is added to an assembled page, static filters do not. Additionally, prompted filters affect all new content on the page, or any referenced content that uses the filter. Static filters, on the other hand, affect only the item for which the filter was created.
  • Viewing the Structure of a Visualization With the Outline. When creating a visualization with multiple components, you can see a hierarchical tree of page components by clicking Outline on the sidebar. This allows you to clearly see the structure of your visualization including which items are a sub-component of another component. The outline also provides access to the JavaScript and CSS text editors, where you can type custom code to modify your page based on specified object classes. You can select an item from the outline in order to see a pertinent set of options on the Settings and Format tabs of the Properties panel, as an alternative to selecting the item on the canvas.
  • Changing Content From a Chart to a Report. You can now convert a chart to a report and a report to a chart in WebFOCUS Designer. When creating content, both chart type and report layout options are available on the Content picker, allowing you to easily switch between a chart and a report, as well as different types of each, providing added flexibility when creating content.
  • Using Dynamic Grouping for Dimension Field Values. In WebFOCUS Designer, you can use dynamic grouping to combine multiple dimension field values into a new set of larger values in a new grouped field. For example, you may have a field with US state names, but no field for US regions. Using the dynamic grouping functionality, you can create groups for different regions for use in a content item without editing the data source. You create one group that combines state name values like Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts into a New England group, states such as New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania into a Mid-Atlantic group, and so on. You can even add the extraneous, remaining values into an Other group automatically, if you do not think they fit into another defined group.
  • Inherited Themes in a Visualization. When creating content in WebFOCUS Designer, you can apply themes to content items, pages, and portals. When you apply a theme a to a single content item, and then transform it into a page, the same theme is applied automatically to the entire page, and the theme of the content item is inherited from it. This allows the content themes to update automatically when you change the page theme. You can still specify a theme for each content item once the visualization has transformed into a page by selecting a different theme option. When assembling a page from existing content, the theme for each content item is always inherited from the page.

WebFOCUS Designer UI

For More Information

For more information, see Visualizing Data. 

Description

In-Document Analytics Enhancements

  • Sorting Data in an Interactive Report. When working with the Column menu in an interactive report, you can now easily sort data in ascending or descending order. This gives you the flexibility to order your data differently, dynamically.
  • Adding Comments to an Interactive Report. You can now add comments to a selected cell in an interactive report. This gives you the ability to collaborate on a particular item with members of your organization, enabling you to call out values that require immediate attention.
  • Saving Changes to Interactive Content at Run-Time. When working with interactive content at run-time, you can now save changes as you build charts, reports, and visualizations. This feature saves a copy of your output, in its current state, to the Downloads folder on your machine. The default name of the output file is ARsave.html, and includes a Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) date/time stamp. This allows you to capture snapshots of your content at specific intervals, enabling you to share your output with others in your organization.
  • Ability to Burst Multigraph Charts With AHTML Format. You now have the ability to burst multigraph charts that use AHTML formats to users in your organization. This added capability enables the sending of unique sections of a multigraph chart to recipients in a distribution list. For example, using WebFOCUS scheduling and distribution tools, you can choose to burst specific sections of a multigraph chart to recipients based on a parameter, such as region, that you configure.
For More Information

For more details, see Working With Interactive Content. 

Description

Server Enhancements 

  • Comparing or Merging Server Files. Using the server Compare Files and Merge Files options, you can compare or merge two files in the server text editor.
  • Using Custom Folding in the Text Editor. Custom folding enables you to choose the type of commands that you want to remain unfolded. This is especially useful when you open the Session Log, which contains all of the commands generated in your session.
  • Using Text Editor Tab Key Navigation. The text editor Tab key navigation supports Section 508 Accessibility Compliance by enabling users to navigate through the interface using the Tab key on the keyboard.
  • Sharing Application Directories and Files. Users can share their personal content under their myhome application with other users, groups, or roles.
  • Using the Git Diff Tool. Once you have configured the Adapter for Git, you can use the Git Diff tool to open two versions of the same file in side-by-side panels, or generate a list of changes to a folder.
For More Information

For more information, see Server Administration. 

Description

Adapter Enhancements

  • SQL Adapters: Optimizing OUTPUTLIMIT. An OUTPUTLIMIT filter in a TABLE request is now, by default, passed to some SQL data sources as FETCH FIRST n ROWS. When needed, it can be suppressed using the optimization setting FEATOPT OUTPUTLIMIT OFF.
  • Adapter for Hive: Bulk Loading Data With Non-Printable Characters. When using Extended Bulk Load on a flow to load to Hive, a setting SQLHIVE SET ESCAPE ON can be used to correctly process non-printable ASCII characters such as Linefeed or Carriage
    Return characters. With this setting an intermediate JSON file is created to load into Hive.
  • Adapter for Hive: Support for New Transactions With ORC-Formatted Records. When you configure the properties for a Hive target in a data flow, you can specify that new transactions will be allowed for ORC-formatted records.
  • Adapter for MySQL: Support for Running Under an SSH Tunnel. The Adapter for MySQL can be configured to connect to a Secure Shell (SSH) Tunnel. SSH tunneling transports data over an encrypted SSH connection. Local forwarding is used to forward a port from the client machine to the server machine. The SSH client listens for connections on a configured port, and when it receives a connection, it tunnels the connection to an SSH server. The server connects to a configured destination port, which can be on a different machine than the SSH server.
  • Adapter for Oracle: Support for Version 19c. Read/Write support has been added for Oracle Version 19c.
  • Adapter for Oracle: Support for Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud. The Adapter for Oracle supports Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) in the cloud, running versions 19c,18c, or 12c.
  • Adapter for Oracle: Support for HINT on Segment Level. Hints in Oracle enable the user to affect the execution plan for an SQL statement, using knowledge of the data. The ENGINE SQLORA SET HINT command enables the user to specify hints at the SQL statement level. This feature enables the user to add hints for each segment in the Access File.
  • Adapter for TIBCO SnappyData. The Adapter for TIBCO SnappyData is new in this release and can be found in the SQL group of
    adapters.
  • Adapter for SQL Server: Version 2019 Support. The Adapter for Microsoft SQL Server now supports SQL Server Version 2019.
  • Adapter for Salesforce.com: Saving Intermediate and Log Files. When loading data to Salesforce.com using the Bulk API, you can retain an intermediate file that is created, as well as the log (response) file. You can then use these files in conjunction with the batch results to see which records were loaded successfully (with the internal id for those records), and which were not (with the error message for those records).
For More Information

For more information, see Adapter Administration. 

Fixes
  • When applying SQUEEZE/WRAP=n to a column in an HTML report, the field data is not horizontally aligned.
Upgrade Notes

This version of WebFOCUS is for new application and development only. 

As of Release 8207, Apache Solr™ is installed and configured for WebFOCUS Search. For more information about the Apache Solr installation, see the WebFOCUS Apache Solr™ Cloud Installation and Configuration Guide. For more information about the configuration of Apache Solr settings within the WebFOCUS Client, see the WebFOCUS Security and Administration technical content.

Known Issues
  • The canvas of WebFOCUS Designer for this release is an interactive canvas based on AHTML. When creating a report, page and row break settings are not supported on this canvas for this release. If you select any other output format, such as HTML, PDF, PPTX, or XLSX, you will see these breaks at runtime. These output format options are available for stand-alone content items only. This will be resolved with the introduction of the non-interactive document canvas in a future release.
  • When working with the Cell menu in an interactive report, the filtering functionality does not work as expected.
  • When saving an artifact (from or of and interactive report, chart or dashboard), the output file name is ARsave.html rather than ARhtml.html.
  • If you create a report or chart in ARVERSION=2 (In-Document Analytics) and you set the output format to PDF Analytic Document, an error occurs when you run it. If you change the option in Procedure Settings to Legacy, the report or chart is produced correctly.
  • If you are working with an In-Document Analytics chart in landscape mode on an Android mobile device and you switch to portrait mode, your content displays in fullscreen mode. Your chart displays at the bottom. If you run your content in new window mode, your In- Document Analytics chart does not display in fullscreen mode, displaying the chart on the right.
  • HIDENULLACRS, which hides across columns that have null or zero values in the entire column, is not supported with interactive content using the new Designer style of In-Document Analytics capabilities.
  • If you add an existing ARVERSION=1 report to an AHTML document set to ARVERSION=2, it fails at run time, displaying JSON text on the screen instead of the expected report output.
  • If you are working with a procedure (.fex) and you change the ARVERSION to ARVERSION=2, global filters do not display when you run the procedure.
  • Fully-developed content sharing capabilities are not available in release 8207.
  • In a scatter plot chart or bubble chart, multiple measure fields in the horizontal and vertical axis buckets generate separate axes, resulting in a grid of scatter plots for each combination of measure fields. In WebFOCUS Designer, if you create a scatter plot chart or bubble chart with multiple measures in the Vertical or Horizontal buckets, only the axis for the first measure in each bucket displays on the canvas. When you run the chart, all measure fields in the Vertical and Horizontal buckets are shown as separate axes, as intended.
  • Users whose ID includes one or more NLS characters receive the "User needs at least one of METAP, METUP; or ADTP privileges" error message when they attempt to upload a file, even when they are working in the Domain Developer group or in another group that maintains at least one of those privileges. In order to resolve this issue, reinstall WebFOCUS using the most recent version of the 8207 Integrated Installation.
  • Both the db_collation.sh file and the db_collation.bat file generate the "Main WARN Error while converting string [] to type," error message in the Command Prompt window at the end of their run. This message has no impact on the functionality of this post-installation utility, and it completes the run successfully.
  • The load_repos.sh file generates the "WARNING: sun.reflect.Reflection.getCaller Class is not supported. This will impact performance," error message in the Command Prompt window at the end of its run. In addition, the db_inplace_update.sh, WFReposUtilCMDLine.sh, and update_repos.sh files generate the "Main WARN Error while converting string [ ] to type," error message in the Command Prompt window at the end of their run. These messages have no impact on the functionality of these post installation utilities, and each one completes its run successfully.
System Requirements

This release is now certified and has been tested with Google Chrome version 77, Firefox Quantum version 69, and Microsoft Edge version 44. For additional browser details, see Browser Information. 

As of Release 8207 Apache Solr™ is installed and configured for WebFOCUS Search. For more information about the Apache Solr installation, see the WebFOCUS Apache Solr™ Cloud Installation and Configuration Guide. For more information about the configuration of Apache Solr settings within the WebFOCUS Client, see the WebFOCUS Security and Administration technical content.