WebFOCUS 8207.26 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 26, 2021

wf022221a Gen 9

wi022221a 

as021921a

8207.26 Gen 1931

New Features

Enhancements to Filter Control Loading in Assembled Pages

Enhancements have been made to improve the run-time performance of pages assembled from existing content to which multiple filters have been added. These enhancements especially improve the performance and reduce the initial loading time of assembled pages with multiple filter controls and filter chaining.

Previously, filter controls in assembled pages were populated with values when the page initially loaded. The loaded filter control values included all possible combinations of chained values. This delayed the loading of content that was dependent on values from those filter controls. Now, to improve performance and make loading more efficient, default values for all filters are loaded first, allowing filtered content on the page to load sooner. Additionally, chained filters are not populated until they are used, so that values do not load until they are needed.

To learn more about filters in pages assembled from existing content, see the Applying Prompted Filters From External Content topic.

WebFOCUS Hosted Help 

As of this release, WebFOCUS 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 Help topic for how to install Online Help on your own internal application server.

Classifying Metadata During Upload and Using it in a Data Flow

Metadata Classification examines your data and assigns classifications to the columns, which can then be used to match columns from separate data sources. In this release, you can classify data that you upload, and use it to match fields in a Union in a Data Flow.

When uploading a data file, you can now view the recommended metadata classification values for each character-valued column. You can choose to keep the recommended values, or to change them.

Including classification values in your data improves the accuracy of mapping column tables correctly to each other. This is useful if you are integrating data from multiple sources, or if integrating data into a system with a predefined hierarchy.

The new Data Classification engine is a machine learning application, provided as a service, that will base class assignments on examining actual data values. It is trained by being given access to large volumes of data gathered throughout the world. This application will continually learn more about data and how to classify it, and new classes will be added as needed.

For more information, see the WebFOCUS Release Notes PDF

Joining to a Variable in a Data Flow

You will now be prompted to enter a value, if you create a join condition that compares a field to a variable, when that variable has no default value.

For more information, see the WebFOCUS Release Notes PDF

VPAT Certification

This release has a VPAT certification. For more information, see Accessibility Compliance topic.


Fixes

  • Queries against an ElasticSearch synonyms that contain an ELASNEST segment results in errors: (FOC45640) Request Failed. HTTP Status: 400 Bad Request Reason: Bad Request (FOC45641) HTTP Response: {"error":{"root_cause":[ {"type":"illegal_argument_exception","reason":"[nested] requires 'query' field"} ],"type":"illegal_argument_exception","reason":"[nested] requires 'query' field"},"status":400} (201204081)
  • When joining to the input of a REST adapter Master File and the field is numeric, quotes are missing from around the value in the JSON body of the request. (201223055)
  • When launching WebFOCUS Designer on a remote machine from a link in an HTML page, a cross-origin exception occurs. (210120080)
  • When a control is chained, repeated clicks on the control causes an issue where a user cannot close the drop-down control. (201113001)
  • When setting a button to refresh a drop-down control from the Tasks & Animation panel, it does not refresh the control when the drop-down is set to multiple. (210106019)
  • Issue with filter drop-down control (popup style) shrinking after upgrade. (210127056)
  • After loading a Saved Set of Parameters, the loaded value displays a "No data to display" error message. (201223001)
  • When running a TABLE FILE request to a Vertica Master file, an error occurs if the user uses SEG.fieldname and ON TABLE SAMEDB. (200603049)
  • When utilizing the STRREP function in a 942 - Japanese (Shift-JIS) environment, different characters are displayed. Issue does not occur in Unicode 65001. (210108004)
  • Join to second segment defined via CRFILE results in crash agent on Windows and a FOC37001 error on Linux. (201103020)
  • Traffic Lights causing errors when using different measure groups in InfoAssist report. (200820042, 210115048)
  • Footer disappears when a report is run using 'KPI Table' chart extension (200918063)

Upgrade Notes

  • As of Release 8207.26, WebFOCUS 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. 
     
  • 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 88, Firefox version 85, 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