WebFOCUS 8207.19 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
Thursday, November 5, 2020

wf102820a Gen 19

wi102820a

as102820a

 8207.19 Gen 1924

New Features

Server Text Editor Supports Jump to Next or Previous Difference in Compare and Merge

In the Server Console, the Text Editor Compare Files and Merge Files pages now have Jump to Next Difference and Jump to Previous Difference buttons.

These buttons enable you to see connected differences easily, without scrolling.

To compare or merge files, multi-select two files, right-click, and select either Compare Files or Merge Files. Although both can show the differences, only Merge Files enables you to move content between the files. Compare Files is read-only.

The files open with left and right scrolling locked to the first difference, aligned in the middle of the window (when the file sizes allow), as shown in the following image for Merge Files.

Server Text Editor Supports Jump to Next or Previous Difference in Compare and Merge

For more information, see the WebFOCUS Release Notes PDF. 

Generate Flows Highlights Rows With Validation Errors

The Generate Flows process has two points of validation. When you click the Verify button on the Generate Flows screen, your selections and edits on the screen are validated. When you click Generate & Save or Generate & Submit, additional validation is done before the flows and synonyms are generated.

The list of validation errors appears in the widget at the top of the screen. In addition, if rows in the table at the bottom of the screen have validation errors, those rows are highlighted, as shown in the following image, in which the source and target folders and names are the same.

Generate Flows Highlights Rows With Validation Errors

Correct the errors and click the Verify button to validate your changes.

Empty Application Message in the Server Console

When the Server Console opens to the Applications page by default, only the top level folders are displayed, and when an application folder is selected, only files in that folder are shown.

If you select an application folder that has no files, a message telling you to select a different application displays on the empty canvas, as shown in the following image.

Empty Application Message in the Server Console

Cross-Join Performance Improvements

The following retrieval performance improvements have been made for joining multiple tables in different databases.

  • If there is more than one cluster of tables from the same DBMS in the FROM clause, joins between those tables are passed to the corresponding DBMS.
  • If there is a WHERE condition on fields from the outer table in a left or right outer join, and this condition always fails for null values, that join is converted to an inner join.
  • If there is WHERE condition on fields from the left, right, or both tables in a full outer join, and this condition always fails for null values, that join is converted to a left, right, or inner join.
  • Merge sub-select phrases if from, where, group by, and having are the same and re-use the temporary table created for the merge sub-select statement.

For more information, see the WebFOCUS Release Notes PDF. 

New Setting for Controlling Display of Unreferenced Business View Fields

In prior releases, when a synonym had a Business View defined, the Object Inspector in the WebFOCUS tools, such as Designer, displayed only those fields that were referenced in a Business View folder.

A new setting is available in the Server Console that enables you to show all fields, even those not referenced in a folder.

For more information, see the WebFOCUS Release Notes PDF. 

Adapter for OData: Support for Reformatting Fields

In prior releases, the Adapter for OData did not pass aggregation to the OData engine if SUM or BY fields were reformatted to a different USAGE format in a request. The Adapter for OData can now pass aggregation to OData when SUM or BY fields are reformatted in a request.

Adapter for OData: Support for MISSING

The Adapter for OData now translates the filters field EQ MISSING and field NE MISSING in a report request to field eq null and field ne null in the generated OData aggregated or non-aggregated request.

Only the root segment and unique child segments (SEGTYPE=U) are supported for filtering on MISSING in the OData request.

The following request is an example of a TABLE request that filters on MISSING.

TABLE FILE CUSTOMERS
PRINT
CUSTOMERS.CUSTOMERS.COMPANYNAME
CUSTOMERS.CUSTOMERS.COUNTRY
IF CUSTOMERS.CUSTOMERS.COUNTRY NE MISSING
END

The following is the generated OData request, with the filter translated to a filter on null.

https://services.odata.org/V4/Northwind/Northwind.svc/Customers?
   $select=CustomerID,CompanyName,Country&$filter=Country%20ne%20null

Fixes

  • The Web Console does not display the Custom message on the Login page when configured on the Login Message page. (200917106)
  • As of 8207.15, it is longer possible to create a hold file in InfoAssist, when using Sample Data and Query Mode. (200922035, 200910011)
  • Incorrect user description is displayed when using x509 after authentication. (200521130)
  • When dragging a date column (HYYMDS) to the filter area on the Designer canvas, the canvas does not load. (200922061)
  • As of 8207.10, HTML page using RDF packaging have a loading page that never finishes. (200930046)
  • When opening pages that utilize RDF package in App Studio 8207.17 or 8207.18, all of the content on the page is pushed to the left side in design mode. The pages are runtime are unaffected, even after saving. (201001088)
  • Upgrading from 8207.11 to 8207.17, there are JS errors when loading HTML Composer pages and the page throws an error and does not load. (200922001, 201001138, 200930075)
  • When creating a Responsive HTML page and you add content to the Containers, the containers get resized at run time. (200723106)
  • In App Studio, when a slider is using a Range, the set current selection does not work. (200923073)
  • When using pages containing drop-down controls populated by XML request procedures created in previous App Studio releases, the controls will not be populated when running in Internet Explorer 11 This issue does not occur for new dropdowns created after the upgrade, and does not occur if the drop-down is changed to another control type and back. (200820099)
  • Wide report width (LRECL) does not generate output (200911078)
  • Using AUTOFIT with active reports makes the total disappear. (200901107)
  • In an active report, if the field name is greater than 7 characters then the columns will misalign as you scroll the report. This issue only occurs in SET ARVERSION=2. (200703005)

Upgrade Notes

  • As of WebFOCUS 8207.15, the default setting for ALLOW-NOPRINT is ON. In AHTML reports using the new Designer style (ARVERSION=2), you can select hidden or NOPRINT fields, when you create a new component from the Options menu. These fields are also available in the fields list, when you create a chart, rollup, or pivot from the Column menu.
  • 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 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.
  • When creating stacked bar, area, and line charts in WebFOCUS Designer, you can select Show stacked totals, in the Series options on the Format tab, to show the total value of the stacked riser above each bar or point in the chart. You can also use series-level data labels to show a value for each series, representing a subset of the stacked riser. If the position of the series-level data labels is set to Above, then the label for the top-most series may overlap with the total label for the stacked riser. To avoid this overlap, select a different option from the Position menu.
  • In Release 8207.19, McAfee VirusScan Enterprise prevents WebFOCUS JSP files from getting compiled during deployment of the WebFOCUS application. For more information and a workaround, see the WebFOCUS Release Notes PDF.

Browser Information

This release is certified and has been tested with Google Chrome version 86, Firefox version 81, Microsoft Edge Chromium version 85 (WebFOCUS only), Microsoft Edge version 44 (WebFOCUS only), and Internet Explorer version 11. Internet Explorer Compatibility mode is not supported. For additional browser details, see Browser Information.