WebFOCUS 8207.20 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, November 16, 2020

wf110620a Gen 22

wi110620a

as110620a

 8207.20 Gen 1925

New Features

Global WebFOCUS Server Monitoring Console

Cluster Manager (CLM) enables you to balance workload across a number of servers, by configuring any number of remote server nodes under one cluster name. CLM has polling and monitoring capabilities to identify which servers are up-and-running, average query response time, and the number of concurrent tasks running. CLM can also identify which remote servers are down, and appropriately re-route requests, as well as route a user connection to the most efficient remote server to enhance overall performance.

However, in prior releases, you had to open each remote server node separately in its own browser window in order to monitor and manage its agents. Now, CLM provides a Global Monitoring Console for all remote server nodes in a cluster, as well as remote servers defined dynamically.

For more information, see the WebFOCUS Release Notes PDF. 

New Functions for Date-time Conversion Between Local and UTC Time

Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is the time standard commonly used around the world. To convert UTC time to a local time, a certain number of hours must be added to or subtracted from the UTC time, depending on the number of time zones between the locality and Greenwich, England (GMT).

For more information, see the WebFOCUS Release Notes PDF. 

Adapter for PostgreSQL: Support for Change Data Capture (CDC)

In DataMigrator, CDC updates the target using a log file that contains the list of changes to a source, which avoids having to process the entire source file.

Now, DataMigrator can support CDC with PostgreSQL through the consumption of Logical decoding in PostgreSQL.

For more information, see the WebFOCUS Release Notes PDF. 

Showing Whether a Column Supports Nulls in the Select, Merge, and Synonym Editors

The Choose Columns dialog box in the Select and Merge Editors in a Data Flow, and in the Synonym Editor, now enables you to see whether each column listed in the editor supports null values.

For more information, see the WebFOCUS Release Notes PDF. 

Migrating Data Flows

When you create a Data Flow, an SQL request is generated that retrieves data from Source databases, applies transformations, if necessary, and loads the data to Target databases.

In new releases of DataMigrator, improvements are made, when possible, to the code that is generated for the Flows. The new code uses new back-end algorithms for reading and loading the data, allowing an improved performance.

If a Data Flow created in a prior release no longer runs, or seems to run too slowly, you can migrate the flow to the current release. This process will update the code for the generated Flow to the latest syntax, and take advantage of performance and optimization improvements available in the current release of DataMigrator.

For more information, see the WebFOCUS Release Notes PDF. 

Selecting Excel as the Default Target Adapter in a Flow

In prior releases, Excel could not be selected as the default target adapter for Data Flows. Now, if the Adapter for Excel is configured, Excel can be selected as the default adapter.

For more information, see the WebFOCUS Release Notes PDF. 

Using a Delimited Target When No Relational Adapter is Available

If you create a Data Flow in the Web Console or the Data Management Console (DMC), and no relational adapter is configured, the default Adapter will be Delimted Files.

For more information, see the WebFOCUS Release Notes PDF. 

Adapter for SharePoint: Create Synonym Support for Multiple Sites in List Mode

In prior releases, when you created a synonym using the Adapter for SharePoint and selected Lists mode, only one site displayed. Now, if multiple sites are available, they all appear.

For more information, see the WebFOCUS Release Notes PDF. 

Adapter for REST: Support for No Value in a Label in the JSON Body

The Adapter for REST can now pass a label with no value within the JSON Body for a POST request.

For more information, see the WebFOCUS Release Notes PDF. 

Adapter for REST: Support for CSV Format in a REST Response

The Adapter for REST can create metadata for an XML or JSON Web Service response.

If a Web Service response is in CSV format, use the following process to create the response metadata.

For more information, see the WebFOCUS Release Notes PDF. 

Adapter for Apache Hive: Creating Avro Files

Using the Adapter for Apache Hive, files can now be created in the Avro self-describing binary file format. Avro is a portable (language neutral) format that can be created in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).

For more information, see the WebFOCUS Release Notes PDF. 

 

Fixes

  • Active report that previously worked, hangs with Loading... message. If you select F12, you will see console errors. (200914090)
  • An Excel sheet exported from an Analytic Document is corrupted. This issue occurs with the following three conditions: COMPUTE or DEFINE field in Px.x% format, BY field, ACROSS field. (200617010)
  • Unable to delete Attendre la fin de l'exécution (Waiting for completion) once assigned to a task in the PageWait Travaux & Animations option in the French version of App Studio. (200924004)
  • After using App Studio for some time, the user receives an error message when they try to close a FOCEXEC that is open on the canvas and has changes. (201008009)
  • When using different folders to put objects into the domain (Reporting Objects, Graphs, Reports), during the execution of the procedures that have the same name as the Reporting Objects, you get an error. (200902138)
  • When on-demand filter loading is turned on, drop-down menus do not populate with dates when the page is run in Internet Explorer.(201001088)
  • After selecting Clear buckets content in an active chart, the user is unable to add fields to the query. Issue only pertains to ARVERSION 2. (200806017)
  • A PDF report implementing horizontal tab characters in Unicode environment displays the characters as square boxes in the heading of the report. (200514031)
  • Arabic characters generating wrong text in PDF format. (200917007)
  • When a data cell has a single "space" character, it is not preserved in the report output for XLSX format. (200130099)
  • The URL to Stop a Self-Service Request in a legacy application or environment has been fixed to stop self-service requests and continues to display the message to confirm the requests are stopped. (200819002)
  • When using the Data Management Console, attempts to rename an application directory fail sometimes and display a blank dialog box. (200902102)
  • Using the Synonym Editor with the Advanced Expression to add a new expression with illegal characters results in a Status 400 bad request error message when run, instead of a warning message during creation. (200406120)
  • Using Resource Analyzer with a PostgreSQL repository fails when bulk load is enabled and reverts to the slower row-at-a-time processing. (200422022)

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.