WebFOCUS 8207.07 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 Reporting Server
Monday, April 13, 2020

wf040920b Gen 15

wi040920b

as040920b

 8207.07 Gen 1912

New Features

Adapter for Hyperstage (PG): Installation Setting for Heap Size

By default, Hyperstage reserves 75% of memory for use in its functionality. If other processes are running during the Hyperstage installation, Hyperstage may not be able to reserve that much memory, and the installation process may not complete properly.

The amount of memory that Hyperstage reserves can be adjusted during installation using the ServerMainHeapSize setting on the Set Initial Settings page, as shown in the following image.

The setting will be added in the infobright.cnf file within the HyperstagePG\ib_data directory.

Supporting Direct Bulk Load for a Flow

Direct Bulk Load is feature of DataMigrator and Data Flow that can significantly shorten load times when a source file is in the expected format of the bulk load program for the database to be loaded. The faster load times result from loading the file directly, without creating an intermediate file.

In prior releases, Direct Bulk Load could only be enabled as an adapter setting, meaning that all flows using that adapter would use it. This could be problematic if some input files met the requirements of a database and some did not.

Now you can enable or disable Direct Bulk Load on each data flow. However, in order for Direct Bulk Load to be enabled for a flow, Extended Bulk Load must be used and Optimize Load must be enabled.

When Extended Bulk Load is used and Optimize Load is enabled, data is loaded directly to the target database without the additional extract and transformation steps.

Slowly Changing Dimensions Activation Flag Enhancement

Synonyms for data sources that have Type I and Type II Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD) have an activation flag that identifies whether a record is part of the history or is currently active.

In prior releases, the flag had to be an integer value, where the value 1 identified the active record and the value zero (0) identified inactive (historical) records.

Starting in this release, the activation flag can be a user-defined alphanumeric value up to 20 characters. For example:

FIELDNAME=ACTIVE, ALIAS=ACTIVE, USAGE=A20V, ACTUAL=A20V, $

When this field described as a character field, you can still use the values 1 and 0 as in prior releases, or you can assign other values. To assign values, you can use the Set Variables object on a Process Flow tab and set values for the global variables CM_SCDACT and CM_SCDINACT.

Source Control Management

Now you can use Source Control management directly from the Home Page. Any workspace can be added to the external GIT Source Control repository, where it can be stored, synced, and safely backed up. This feature allows you to easily reconcile edits made to the same content by different users, store your source code in a centralized location, view historical record of changes overtime, retrieve a specific version of a file, and more. The Source Control feature must be enabled in the Administration Console.

Additional enhancements, such as SCM History and DIFF or Command Line functionality, will be included in a future release.

Source Control Management

Fixes

  • Under certain circumstances, the reporting server agent crashes when creating an AHTML chart. (191104054)
  • When selecting a connection and the list of synonym candidates is empty, a message appears without the ability to dismiss it. (191004007)
  • When using the adapter for Salesforce.com®, some server-generated SOQL (Salesforce Object Query Language) queries to retrieve data were not valid or efficient.
  • Using the adapter for Salesforce.com for a request using the NOT-FROM operator is converted to NOT BETWEEN a AND b in a SOQL request.
  • Data is loaded incorrectly when using the adapter for Amazon Athena to load data from a table containing newline or carriage return characters.
  • The displayed output for sorting a field in descending order is not sorted correctly in an aggregated OData request. (200311015)
  • Metadata of a cross-data partitioned table contains extra information that causes the report to fail with errors. (200313007)
  • Only the first value is retrieved from the primary file when joining to a parameterized URL using the REST adapter. (200225058)
  • Cannot edit field characteristics, only titles when uploading an Excel® workbook that contains multiple worksheets and using advanced mode. (191030041)
  • GEO ROLE is still generated when using Get Data after setting Activate GEOGRAPHIC_ROLE to Off and uploading a file. (190902027)
  • When using the advanced mode to upload an Excel workbook with a name that includes periods and contains multiple worksheets, dragging a worksheet to the Join editor results in an error. (200128075)
  • When opening a synonym and selecting a Frequent Values chart or Pie chart from Data Profiling in App Studio, the chart does not display. (200306003)
  • TABLEF with MISSING and COMPUTE produces different output than when using TABLE. (190201019)
  • From the Data Management Console when selecting an Application Directory and selecting Get Data more than six times, the adapter selection screen does not appear.
  • On windows, the Reporting Server's TCP listener sporadically becomes unresponsive after a large number of connections. (190708017)
  • The sort order of DBCS values in a dynamic drop-down list is set to locale UTF-8 instead of SJIS. (191126009)
  • An EXL07 report that includes a drilldown that passes a parameter value over 2000 bytes in length crashes. (191203132)
  • Selecting SORT ASCENDING, SORT DESCENDING or PAGING for next page or last page on an AHTML report that includes RANKED BY and WEBVIEWER ON returns an error: WebFOCUS Error Executing (11143007, 190806024, 190816066, 200203011, 180928004)
  • When creating a coordinated compound document using a sort field that is defined as A87 or greater on a Unicode (UTF8) server, the agent crashes. (200317134)
  • When parsing an XML file, the parser does not disable the access to external entities, thus, enabling payloads that might cause the server to perform unexpected actions. (200211064)
  • An error occurs when the output viewer in App Studio is set to Microsoft Edge. (200204016)
  • Using a font family that contains a space in the name will not render in a check box or radio button control. (190920097)
  • Refreshing a portal page keeps the last values and does not reset the report parameters. (200203003)
  • The Distribution List displays Name and To values as blanks when editing a schedule. (191023147)
  • When a connection to a remote server is deleted from one user profile, it is deleted from all
    user profiles. (200117051)
  • The user is unable to use InfoAssist to edit a JOIN and add the Join host field when the JOIN was created and request saved before adding the Join host field. (181009084, 190801007)
  • In InfoAsssist, opening a request with a static filter that includes a space character results in an error: Unrecoverable error Code: 10005 opening report with <> in static filter (200228043)
  • Double-precision data fields without decimal places in an Active Report are not sorted correctly after a roll-up. (200123011)
  • Cannot change the title of multiple ACROSS fields by selecting them from the Live Preview canvas without generating an unrecoverable error. (180130002, 180626023, 191023186)
  • Using IN-GROUPS-OF n TILES to group data in percentiles for reports or charts causes an abend when used with SET EMPTYREPORT=ON and the request returns no data. (200124059)
  • A WHERE clause using a field with the DBA property RESTRICT=NOPRINT is ignored, allowing the field value to be printed. The WHERE generates an internal DEFINE that is not associated with the original field. (200310047)

Upgrade Notes

  • When upgrading from release 8206.xx to 8207.xx, the WebFOCUS Integrated Installation does not automatically assign the Unicode UTF-8 (CP65001) code page to the Reporting Server configuration. In order to configure the Reporting Server to use the UTF-8 code page, you can select the entry directly from the CODE_PAGE? list. In the Web Server console, this list appears in the NLS Configuration tab of the Workspace node.

    We recommend that you apply this change because, as of release 8207, WebFOCUS Integrated Installations configure all installed components to use the UTF-8 code page. Changing the Reporting Server code page to UTF-8 will ensure that there is no mismatch of code pages between WebFOCUS, Tomcat, and the Reporting Server, which could result in data retrieval issues.
  • In Release 8207, Magnify functionality is not available. To add Magnify functionality to Release 8207 and higher, see the manual steps outlined in this topic.  
  • As of Release 8207, in App Studio, the Domains node in the Configured Environments tree has been renamed to the Workspaces node.
  • The WebFOCUS Server on Linux using the Adapter for salesforce.com now requires using OpenSSL version 1.1.1. While current distributions include this release older ones do not.

    This software can be downloaded from https://www.openssl.org/source/ and it must be compiled with the shared option.

    Ater this, create symbolic links to the required libraries. For example, if the directory used was /usr/local/ssl, issue the following commands:

    sudo ln -sf /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.so.1.1 /usr/lib64/libssl.so
    sudo ln -sf /usr/local/ssl/lib/libcrypto.so.1.1 /usr/lib64/
    libcrypto.so

Known Issues

  • The WebFOCUS help system does not work when the Application Server is configured with Java Version 11. As a workaround, you can configure your WebFOCUS instance to use help hosted by IBI. This provides an additional benefit, as users will have access to the latest content. See the workaround in the Release Notes PDF. 
  • 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 an Insight-enabled chart created in the 8207.00 version of WebFOCUS Designer is added to a visualization as external content, the Insight icon does not appear on the chart when the page is run, so Insight features cannot be accessed. Resave the chart in WebFOCUS Designer 8207.01 or later to make Insight available when the chart is added to a visualization.
  • 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.
  • In a scatter plot chart or bubble chart, multiple measure fields on the horizontal and vertical axes 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.
  • The Expression Editor has a an area that displays objects that you can add to an expression, which are columns, variables or functions. The selection and display of these was controlled by buttons above the area, but when then size of the area was compressed, some of the buttons were hidden. Now there is a single button with a pull-down menu that allows selecting what objects are displayed.
  • 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.
  • App Studio upgrades are currently not supported. Messages related to failures that occurred while merging changes in the mime.wfs and languages.xml files display during the upgrade installation process.
  • In Release 8207, you cannot install a standalone version of ReportCaster. If you attempt to do so, you receive an error message after you click Next to exit the Advanced Configuration page of the installation wizard. Currently, there is no workaround for this issue. However, you can successfully install ReportCaster by including it in a WebFOCUS installation.
  • When using MS SQL Server as the database platform for the WebFOCUS Repository and upgrading from 8105M to 8207.06, only MS SQL Server 2008 and 2012 are supported. MS SQL Server 2014 and later versions are not supported.

Browser Information 

This release is now certified and has been tested with Google Chrome version 80, Firefox version 74, Microsoft Edge version 80 (WebFOCUS only), and Internet Explorer version 11. For additional browser details, see Browser Information. 

OpenJDK 8 JRE Update 242 (8u242) and Tomcat 8.5.51 are supported and included with the packaging.