WebFOCUS 8207.25 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
Friday, February 5, 2021

wf013021a Gen 5

wi013021a

as013021a

 8207.25 Gen 1930

New Features

Prefix Operators for Dimension Fields Aggregated in Reports

In order to provide more flexibility in how values from your data can be reinterpreted in your content, the number of available prefix operator aggregation options has been expanded for dimension fields added to the Summaries or Counts bucket of a report in WebFOCUS Designer.

For more information, see the WebFOCUS Release Notes PDF. 

Adapter for Microsoft Dynamics CRM: New Mappings for Long String/Memo and Image Data Types

In prior releases of the Adapter for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, a column defined as StringType with a MaxLength greater than 1024, or a column defined as MemoType, had metadata generated with format attributes USAGE=TX80L and ACTUAL=TX. In addition, columns defined as ImageType were not included in the generated metadata.

Now, StringType columns with MaxLength greater than 1024, and MemoType columns, are created with USAGE=STRING and ACTUAL=STRING. STRING is a character data type with no length specification. Also, ImageType columns are created with USAGE=BLOB and ACTUAL=BLOB.

For more information, see the WebFOCUS Release Notes PDF. 

App Studio Hosted Help 

As of this release, WebFOCUS App Studio Help is configured, by default, to use Online Help that is hosted by ibi servers. This Help configuration is applied for new installations or when upgrading from an earlier release. The installation package no longer includes the help files, which greatly reduces the installation file size and time required to install and configure the software. 

If you are restricted to using Hosted Help, see Configuring WebFOCUS App Studio Help for how to install Online Help on your own internal application server.

In addition, the option to install and configure Tomcat is no longer applicable. Tomcat is removed from packaging and the installation program is adjusted to reflect these changes.

Fixes

  • The Export To Microsoft Office product option does not display the appropriate chart type, instead, it uses the Microsoft® default chart type when exporting from a pivot. (180726001)
  • When scrolling through pages, the table display is corrupted. This issue only occurs in Legacy In-Document Analytics in Chrome™, Firefox®, and Microsoft Edge® browsers. (201216005)
  • After unfreezing a FREEZE-COLUMN in an active report, the columns are still frozen. This impacts Legacy In-Document Analytics, not Designer Style In-Document Analytics. (201224037)
  • Some HTML pages built in App Studio remain blank and need to be run multiple times. (201217061)
  • When a full-width space is passed to Display value(parameter_TEXT), it will be output as a half-width space. (210104138)
  • When using the WF_composer_add_ALL_always=YES option, only Admin level users are able to see the correct behavior. (210106039)
  • When a list box control is populated dynamically with a list of procedures and uses the Values are Procedures option, other parameters from the form are not passed on to the procedures being used. (201211059)
  • Internal exception error occurs when a folder or fex filename contains the ≈ character. (201002001)
  • When running a visualization with Insight, changing sort order or changing the aggregation type does not take effect. (201118115)
  • Unable to add BIN values to the Group bucket in WebFOCUS Designer when creating a Tree Map chart. (201209133)
  • FOC error is not visible after creating a Hold file in a temporary location when using InfoAssist Sample Data for an In list parameter. (200817005)
  • When creating a Define field, InfoAssist does not display all information (such as Title, Description, Name, Alias) from fields in a single page, and the first column is not resizable. (201005007)
  • With NLS configured for 1252 encoding, a report won't run if the folder it resides in contains accent characters. Works when NLS is configured for UTF8. (201015073)
  • When editing Users, Groups, or Roles that have leading zeros in the name, Security Center truncates the leading zeros. (190329001)
  • Password in site.wfs visible in trace using External Security. (201112115)
  • Results of an optimized TABLE command for a Hyperstage table (view) containing >2147483647 rows are incorrect. (201006142)
  • Issue with Salesforce® adapter after upgrade installation. (201221017)
  • Y-axis labels and legend labels do not display correctly when SET LAYOUTRTL=ON is applied on JSCHART or AHTML charts. (201123022)
  • If you set up an area chart and apply a minimum to the y-axis, the area colors overflow past the boundaries of the chart itself. (201201034)

Upgrade Notes

  • As of Release 8207.25, WebFOCUS App Studio Help is configured, by default, to use Online Help that is hosted by ibi servers. This Help configuration is applied for new installations or when upgrading from an earlier release. The installation package no longer includes the help files, which greatly reduces the installation file size and time required to install and configure the software.

    For more details, see the Configuring WebFOCUS App Studio Help topic.

  • When upgrading to Release 8207.21 and higher, ReportCaster might fail to start if there are encrypted password credentials in the configuration file. For example, for the SMTP Server, if the Java version that is used, does not contain the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE), ReportCaster might fail to start. In order for ReportCaster to work to encrypt and decrypt passwords, ReportCaster requires Java Cryptography Extension (JCE). This applies to both the Application Server and the ReportCaster Distribution Server. This is not an issue if you are using a current version of Java that includes the JCE by default, such as Java version 180_62.

  • 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

  • The following buckets, used to create reports in WebFOCUS Designer, have been renamed in order to better represent the behaviors of the fields added to them:

    • The Columns bucket has been renamed to Column Groups. This bucket applies the WebFOCUS sort phrase ACROSS.
    • The Summary display option and bucket have been renamed to Summaries. This bucket applies the WebFOCUS display command SUM.
    • The Count display option and bucket have been renamed to Counts. This bucket applies the WebFOCUS display command COUNT.

      The Count aggregation option has not been renamed.

    • The Detail display option and bucket have been renamed to Details. This bucket applies the WebFOCUS display command PRINT.

      The Detail bucket used in charts such as scatter plots and box plots, which uses a single field to provide a set of values to represent in the chart, has not been renamed.

    • The Detail with counter display option and bucket has been renamed to Details with counter. This bucket applies the WebFOCUS display command LIST.

    The behaviors of these display options and buckets have not changed.

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 87, Firefox version 84, Microsoft Edge Chromium version 87 (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.