Release Notes - 2020.12.09

For some time now we have been working on an update to the underlying platform One Model uses for charting within Storyboards and in this release this is available for BETA review by customers. In addition to resolving some niggles we have had with charting in the past (e.g. axis label formatting) one of the most exciting new capabilities is a major increase in the range of configurability options for charts. Also significant is that these controls are available within the Storyboard with no need to return to the Explore tool.

Changes made in the design panel happen instantly making it a much faster intuitive experience. As well as all current settings from Explore we have included some new options and will be adding more based on customer input. Some notable examples include the following settings:

There are a few clean items we are still working on (e.g. embedded forecasting), so the purpose of this BETA release is to check general backward compatibility with existing Storyboards in real world customer scenarios before we make the new charting generally available. To start playing around with the new capability connect with our Customer Success team and they can help enable this for a test user/role so you can evaluate the new capability and see how it works with your existing Storyboards.

We made some improvements to the Storyboard filter bar in this release. The biggest improvement is changing the order of the click action when selecting filters, so now when you first click an element in a filter dimension the first selection is to include (tick) and then the second click let’s you exclude (cross) and the third click turns off all selections.

We made some improvements to the algorithms used for the embedded forecasting within Storyboards so that they better handle charts with a small number of data points.

Often customers use the same metric name for different versions of a metric, so we added the Metric ID as a tooltip in the Metrics Edit page. This can be used to find the exact version of the metric used in the Definition. (ref 6690)

In this release we added an enhancement to the Create/Edit Metric page providing the ability for users to rename the metric categories. To do this previously you would have had to change the category name for each individual metric, now when you change the metric category all metrics within that category will also be automatically updated. These changes will also be reflected across the application, e.g. in the Data Access Roles page. (ref 6719)

The Clear Cache step in the Data Pipeline is now automatically retried if it errors. This will ensure that results from the previous Data Load will be removed when new data is available. (ref 6977)

Added automated retry logic in the Oracle V2 processor for a 404 error coming from Oracle. (ref 6999)

Fixed an issue where a File data source receiving files over SFTP could timeout if there were too many large files being uploaded at once. This was happening for cases where there were over 20 files that were multiple gigabytes of memory each. (6883)

Fixed an issue where Usage Statistics may not be updated to include queries that were run during Amazon's Redshift Maintenance periods. (6710)

We added additional information to usage statistics, namely Storyboard Category, Storyboard Name, Storyboard ID, Tile ID, and Tile Title to the QueryExplored to indicate exactly what query and storyboard were run by the user. (ref 6967)

Added a Storyboard Delete event to Usage Statistics. (ref 6418)

As part of our never-ending mission to continually improve performance we made some changes to how the Top/Bottom ‘n’ Filtering works by running more of this on our back-end infrastructure and only sending to the Storyboard the filtered results. This should improve Storyboard responsiveness and general performance.(ref 6696)

We fixed a problem with new customer instances where the Home Page template couldn’t be modified until a tile had been added. (ref 6978)

Top/Bottom 'n' Filtering was causing Storyboards to crash under certain circumstances. (re 6133 & 6981)

Fixed an issue where tables in Data Destinations could not be configured. This would occur if the Data Destination was based on a Processing Script that had been updated but the page had not been refreshed. (ref 7111)

Some long dimension labels weren’t formatted correctly in the filter bar, so this has been corrected. (ref 6485)

Fixed an issue where Usage Statistics may not be updated to include queries that were run during Amazon's Redshift Maintenance periods. (ref 6836)

Fixed an issue where characters for formatting numbers (such as commas and currency symbols) would be added to fields in data destinations. (ref 6971)

Fixed an issue where JSON Data Sources such as Usage Statistics may create duplicate Data Source Files. This was caused by changes in the structure of the JSON file. (ref 6555)

A gremlin had water splashed on it and somehow an old version of the storyboard filter icons snuck into the product. Anyway, we dried it off and also kept it away from sunlight, stopped feeding it after midnight and got the right icons back. (ref 6982)