15 Apr Omniscope ROCK build – 2021.1

Remember those days when you’re packing for a holiday and you keep adding ‘just one more thing’, until you can no longer close the suitcase? That’s exactly what happened with this edition of our Rock build, so we hope you’ll appreciate all the new features arriving in this pack! 

Download the latest rock build here.

Explore mode

Surf your reports in the new Explore mode – interact with data and chart configuration simultaneously and enjoy the immediate effects. Try all four modes on the main toolbar: Explore (for free-form data discovery), Design (for authoring pixel-perfect dashboards), Present (preview the report as your users would see it) and Focus (zoom into a single view, with drag-and-drop fields, measures and dimensions).

We’ve also comprehensively reorganised view options into meaningful sections  such as “Measure axis”, “Lines”, “Bars”, “Markers”, with a cog menu that lets you search everything. 

Improved Authentication – OpenID Connect

Check out the improved authentication methods – support for session-based authentication using OpenID Connect identity providers (Google, Azure, Keycloak, Okta, Auth0) – suite of configurations supporting flexible security models, role-based authentication managed at the provider, identity management and tracking, account switching, single-sign on (SSO), session expiry and refresh, multi-tenant hosting.

The Admin and Scheduler parts of the app are now part of the same authentication scope, with new permissions available at the root level to control access to them.

New “super-groups”, let you define a server-wide or folder-wide configuration of (e.g.) administrator accounts, which cannot be overridden in subfolders. Existing server deployments will find that the admin credentials have automatically been migrated to an equivalent super-group.

Documentation, as usual, available on our Help Center Solutions section.

Publishing on steroids

Publishing 1 report with 100 variants? No worries – we’ve got your back. Report Generator block will automate creation of reports from a template, including the custom tabs/filters driven by a data configuration (different from the multitenant system).

Give your report viewer more than just a variant – add a Refresh Data button, enabling them to retrieve the latest information at any time. 

Integrate email into your reporting process – either for email data harvesting using the new Email block including the ability to download attachments, or to send out data-triggered alerts (from Validation block) and new report links (via Email output).

Filter, drill down and share your data exploration

Share insights by using the new “Sharable link” option, while preserving the exact tab and filter states. Or build links with customised filters yourself, using our scheme to specify filters. Use the new Filters button to hide and show your dashboard’s filters. Show view menus reveals a menu per view, to access data export and maximise controls.

We brought new blocks and the tools to build your own

Meet the new blocks in town: Storage – use it as an input or output, sharing the data by table name across projects. Previously experimental, this has now graduated. It also now lets you write data in “append mode”, such that every time you refresh it, the input data is appended to instead of replacing the existing data. Project Metadata block: extract metadata about blocks, outputs, schema, reports, tabs, data sources from a project, to facilitate “configuration as data” automation workflows.  Spring clean any workflow with new “Clean-up data” action and delete data not used by reports – available as in the workflow app menu, as a scheduler task, and also automatically in the background for older projects. 

Previously experimental, the Custom block lets you create reusable blocks from your own Python or R code, and share them with your team, or publish them on our Github community blocks repository.  Now supporting R 4.x, with an option to select an R version.

Misc

• The File Output block now has an Append option when writing to IOD files.
• New formula functions SUBSET_UNIQUECOUNT, TEXTVALUE and INTROUND available in reports.
• You can add Reference Lines to Bar and Line views, and have better control over multiple axes.
• The Bar view lets you configure a custom sort measure, supporting formulas.
• The Workflow API has a new Lambda Workflow Execution endpoint, allowing you to spawn and execute parameterised clones of workflows.
• The Omniscope Setup Console makes setting up a headless Linux server a breeze, with guided licence activation, configuration of the “external web server”, and setup of an admin account. With a silent mode for fully automated deployments. See the Linux Installation help article.
• Omniscope now by default runs with restricted filesystem access when running as an external web server (Team license and up). Your workflows and blocks can no longer access files outside the sharing folder by default. You can revert to the old behaviour in environments where this is not a security concern, using “Allow using files outside Sharing Folder” in Admin, web server settings.
• We’ve renamed the launch scripts on Linux to avoid confusion. The old scripts remain until 2021.2, when they’ll be removed.
• We’ve updated the version of Java that Omniscope runs on and bundles – now Java 11. This requires some configuration changes to custom deployment scripts and Windows Service configurations; see advisory.
• After frankly years of suffering as developers, following Microsoft’s lead and schedule, we are finally dropping support for Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge Legacy. 2021.1 is the last version to support these browsers, with a warning displayed. 2021.2 will fully drop support. The latest versions of Chrome or new Edge are recommended.
• Memory: some improvements to efficiency, and new diagnostics for use in production servers.
• And as always, a huge number of minor enhancements, fixes, stability and diagnostic improvements. See the full changelog for details.

WHAT’S NEXT? YOUR FEATURES!

As always, we’d love to hear what you want added to Omniscope. Please contact us to get access and join the discussion at our public Trello board!