Release Notes For Version 8.1

Table Of Contents

• 8.1 New Features
  • Multi-day bookings
  • Infinite scroll calendars
  • TV Bookings Calendar
  • Remote PC usage recording
  • Miscellaneous
• Updates
  • 8.1.4 September 6th, 2016
  • 8.1.5 September 21, 2016
  • 8.1.6 September 22, 2016
  • 8.1.7 September 26, 2016
  • 8.1.8 September 27, 2016
  • 8.1.9 October 5, 2016
  • 8.1.10 October 5, 2016
  • 8.1.11 October 12, 2016
  • 8.1.12 October 18, 2016
  • 8.1.13 October 18, 2016
  • 8.1.14 October 31, 2016
  • 8.1.15 November 9, 2016
  • 8.1.16 November 30, 2016
  • 8.1.17 December 1, 2016
  • 8.1.18 December 17, 2016
  • 8.1.19 January 11, 2017
  • 8.1.20 January 26, 2017
  • 8.1.21 February 2, 2017
  • 8.1.22 February 23, 2017
  • 8.1.23 March 6, 2017
  • 8.1.24 March 9, 2017
  • 8.1.25 March 16, 2017
  • 8.1.26 March 17, 2017
  • 8.1.27 March 31, 2017
  • 8.1.28 April 4, 2017
  • 8.1.29 April 11th, 2017
  • 8.1.30 April 13th, 2017
  • 8.1.31 April 28th, 2017
  • 8.1.32 April 29th, 2017

8.1 New Features

Multi-day bookings

• Previously, bookings could not go past midnight.
• Bookings can now be as long as you want
• Bookings that repeat can also be multi-day. For example, you might have a 48 hour booking that repeats every week etc.

Infinite scroll calendars

• As well as the existing day, week and month view on all the calendars, we now offer new views that scroll either vertically or horizontally, and the more you scroll, the more bookings are displayed.
• These new views also allow you to customise the display resolution significantly so that if you generally have bookings that are many days or even many months long, you can display more time in a single screen.

TV Bookings Calendar

• A customisable bookings calendar you can display without having to log in
• Designed to be suitable for display on a large screen in a facility foyer
• Also provides read-only access to the bookings calendar for those that want lots of people to see the calendar without being able to log in
• This is not an interactive display.

Remote PC usage recording

• This adds the ability to record who is logged in and what processes are running and for how long as a means of recording actual usage for PC-based usage systems (for example microscopes).

Miscellaneous

• Custom searches can give results depending on current user
  • For example, you can generate a bookings search page that searches for bookings created by the person currently logged in. This would be a custom version of the "My Bookings" page, but you can now use this to customise it further.
• Easily send an email to people from a list of items
  • From a list of bookings or projects or anything else, there is now a button labelled "Send Email..."
  • Tick all the bookings or projects etc you're interested in, click the Send Email... button and, if there are multiple paths from the displayed items in the list to a user, user type, user group or email address, you get a drop-down asking you to select those that you want to send an email to. If there's only one viable path, it will be assumed you want to select that path.
  • You will then be taken to the Send Email page, with the users, user types, user groups or email addresses pre-filled in.
  • When viewing a single item instead of a list, there's also a "Send Email..." buttn that works in the same way.
  • For example, from a project, clicking "Send Email..." will ask whether you want to send an email to one or more of the owner, users, and any other custom properties you may have added that either are users, or have a user property.

Updates

8.1.4 September 6th, 2016

This is the first production-quality release of Calpendo 8.1

Bug Fixes

• Strip any custom HTML from booking ical summary field (from booking title)
• BUGFIX: dual-property path conditions sometimes force wrong variable path
• BUGFIX: 8.0 upgrade of 7.0 broke some rule conditions
• BUGFIX: Collections of biskits stored on a project were mishandled

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8.1.5 September 21, 2016

Changes

• Add a displayed trigger type to each workflow trigger body
• Change workflow event or action tab label to "Event" or "Action"
• Add function "csvDecode" to convert a CSV string into a list of strings
• Add workflow function "find" to find biskits given their type and a list of primary keys
• Add function "copy" to copy the contents of one list to another
• Add support for being able to change workflow function signatures without breaking existing workflows.
• Add new date formats that use the full name for the day and month. For example "Friday January 8", instead of just "Fri January 8" or "Friday Jan 8"
• Display full argument type for each workflow function argument
  • For example, an argument of "Biskit:BiskitDef;" used to be displayed as "Biskit", and so it wasn't saying what sort of biskit it was.
  • Also a list of integers would be shown as "List", but is now "List:Int".
• Allow and require workflows creating bookings to set the booker

Bug Fixes

• Misc bugs with #generate fixed
• Allow enter key to initiate login in FireFox on the login page
• BUGFIX: Upgrading from 7.0.50 or earlier to 8.0 or later failed
• BUGFIX: Upgrading from 7.0.50 or earlier failed in MySQL 5.7.5 and later
• BUGFIX: Exception on running some automatic emails
• BUGFIX: Workflow function actions that took an ExprodoUser argument could not be configured in Calpendo

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8.1.6 September 22, 2016

Changes

• Add extra version of workflow function timeDiffDays that is given a date instead of a date-time.
• Add extra version of workflow function addToGroup that can add a Calpendo project to a Project Group, and add a Calpendo Resource to a Resource Group.
• Add help text to every function that describes exactly what the function does.

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: ForEach workflow action would not run when given a set, only a list
• BUGFIX: Workflow functions addDays(Date, number) were broken
• BUGFIX: Some systems would not let you use checked-editing to edit anything
  • This is when you tick the boxes from a list and edit all the ticked items at the same time.
  • Any databases that was upgraded from 7.0 to 8.0 or 8.1 did not suffer from this problem. It only affected those first created with 8.0 or 8.1
  • This is related to an 8.0 change that lets you control who can use checked-editing, and on what data checked-editing can be done. This is controlled by permissions for the action "Checked Edit".

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8.1.7 September 26, 2016

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Dynamic properties on some dynamic biskits would not work at all
  • This was rare, and depended on how the dynamic biskit was configured
• BUGFIX: Pressing "Update DB Schema..." in the bakery sometimes generated an error (although the user never saw it)
• BUGFIX: Session expiry was mishandled following a bug introduced in 8.1.6

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8.1.8 September 27, 2016

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Login could be prevented if permission conditions have bad paths such as a path to a non-existant property
• BUGFIX: System events recorded emails being sent used wrong name
  • If you look in the System Events page, whenever an email is sent out, the message appears to come from an event source called "DatabaseEventSource".
  • But that is not the part of the system that sends emails.
  • This has now been renamed so new emails sent will be logged as having been sent by "Email Action Handler"
• BUGFIX: Emails that write the value of formulaic properties into the email subject or body were not working...the properties would appear as "null" when the property belonged to something that had just been created, and would be the old value of the property when it had just been updated.
• BUGFIX: One workflow function to control remote hardware was broken
  • This is the function IO24TCP_SetPortFunction that didn't work
  • This is used for controlling the Elexol IO24/TCP
  • See https://www.elexol.com/IO_Modules/Ether_IO24_TCP.php for details

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8.1.9 October 5, 2016

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Repeat Bookings that repeat forever displayed the repeat information incorrectly.
  • Calpendo uses the date December 31 in the year 2999 as a notional end of repeats that repeat forever.
  • The user interface had started to show this date instead of saying that such bookings continued forever.
• BUGFIX: Permission referencing variable meta-property user broke search
  • When a condition in a permission compares something (the left hand part of the condition) to a "variable meta-property" with a path of user, or something inside user, then it caused problems with some reports
• BUGFIX: Reports failed when they had a condition that used the relation "Contains Member" or "Does Not Contain Member".
  • These relations test whether a user group contains a particular user
• BUGFIX: Clicking on the numbers in a summary report of My Projects gave exception
• BUGFIX: Calling a workflow function that has no return type failed.
  • For example, the function addToGroup can be used to add a user to a UserGroup, Project to a ProjectGroup or Resource to a ResourceGroup as a part of an automated workflow.
  • It doesn't return anything, it just changes the contents of the group.
  • But calling it caused an error.
• BUGFIX: On firing a workflow from a database event that watches for a Calpendo User being changed, you could not pass the user as an argment to workflow function addToGroup.
  • You had to change the database event to watch for changes to ExprodoUser instead.
• BUGFIX: A User Group with a null name caused problems
  • It's not normal for User Groups to have a null name. Normally, the worst you can do is create one with an empty name.
  • But it is possible to make its name null, and that was not handled gracefully.
• BUGFIX: Setting the User Group argument of an addToGroup workflow function to a fixed value would sometimes not show a drop-down for selecting the User Group.
• BUGFIX: Adding a user to a User Group in a workflow could change the group's name to null.
  • This was not possible before this version because the above bugs had to be fixed before this bug became evident.
• BUGFIX: Viewing the history of a booking would show the wrong historical values for the booking's start/finish and its last repeat start/finish.

Changes

• Optimisation: building a drop-down with a selection of possible property paths would be a little slower than it needed to be.

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8.1.10 October 5, 2016

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Change permissions to deny Resource EXISTS can prevent user login
  • If a user has previously logged in while they could see a resource that they now cannot see because of a new or changed EXISTS permission, then it would be possible that they couldn't log in.

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8.1.11 October 12, 2016

Changes

• Import now uses the current user's personal setting for "prefer US format dates" instead of the global preference for this setting.
• Search workflow actions now also support refining a previous search.
• Add support for easily sending an email from many biskits
  • When viewing a single biskit, there will now be a button "Send Email..."
  • Click it and, if there are multiple paths from that biskit to a user or email address, you get a drop-down asking you to select those that you want to send an email to. If there's only one viable path, it will be assumed you want to select that path.
  • You will then be taken to the Send Email page, with the users or email addresses pre-filled in.
  • From a list of biskits, you can tick the check box next to those you want to email, and tick the new "Send Email..." button to send an email to all of those biskits. Again, you will get a drop-down to select the paths if there are multiple possible paths.
  • For example, from a project, clicking "Send Email..." will ask whether you want to send an email to one or more of the owner, users, and any other custom properties you may have added that either are users, or have a user property.
• Further improvements to our "Volunteer/participant management system", also known as "privileged search" because it can be configured to allow people limited access for searching amongst data they do not ordinarily have permission to access.

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Users in Resource.managerUsersGroup could not book for any project
  • When you set a manager user group on a resource, users in that group are allowed to select any project when making a booking for that resource.
  • However, after being allowed to select any project, they weren't then allowed to save the booking.
• BUGFIX: When a BitSet value was displayed in an email, the values selected were shown in a pseudo-random order. They are now shown in numerical order.
• BUGFIX: Upgrade to 8.0 did not update Calpendo SearchResultsRule properly
  • The data type you want to search for did not get checked for the various biskit type changes that were done in the 8.0 upgrade.
  • Consequently, some Search Results Rules could now be broken.
• BUGFIX: Change a SearchResults or DoubleBooking to Simple Rule gave exception
  • When a SearchResultsRule or DoubleBooking was saved and then edited, and changed to a Simple Rule, when you clicked Save, you saw an exception.
  • This was saving the change to the database correctly and then the browser would not handle the change properly.
• BUGFIX: Add a custom BitSet property on a user breaks new user registration
  • With a BitSet custom property on a user, trying to go to the new user registration page would fail.

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8.1.12 October 18, 2016

Changes

• Automatic emails sent by workflows can now specify a reply-to address.
  • The default is still the system-wide default configured in global preferences.
• Veto workflow actions can now use a variable for the message to give to the user as well as a fixed value.
• Public Resource instances are now accessible via their id number as well as by their name.
  • This may be interesting to anybody using Public Resource instances as a means to make file attachments accessible without logging in.
  • Typical usage is via a URL like https://yoursite.calpendo.com/downloads?type=public&name=logo or the newly available https://yoursite.calpendo.com/downloads?type=public&id=7
• The layout editor has a new option for each displayed tab that specifies whether multiline string properties should be put into a separate child tab (which is the default and used to be the only possibility) or whether it should be in the main table.
• Further improvements to our "Volunteer/participant management system".
• Excel xlsx is now the default report export option instead of CSV
  • CSV is troublesome for mainland Europe, where a comma is a thousands-separator
  • Whereas xlsx files are generally useful for everybody

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Saving a workflow with a timed event could sometimes cause an exception
• BUGFIX: Workflows upgraded from 7.0 auto emails could not be deleted
• BUGFIX: Boot failed when JDBC driver doesn't support Connection.getSchema()
  • This has been seen to happen in an environment where the connection to the database is configured to run over SSL.
• BUGFIX: Adding predefined slots stopped you from ending a slot at midnight
  • Bookings used to go to at most 23:59 when we didn't support multi-day bookings.
  • Now we support multi-day bookings (although not multi-day time slots) we should allow time slots to go to midnight, not 23:59
• BUGFIX: Predefined time slots don't work with multi-day bookings
  • This would only have affected those people that use multi-day bookings and that use predefined time slots.
• BUGFIX: CSV report export gave badly formatted output for some property types
  • The worst problem was a BitSet value which contains a comma whenever there is more than one item selected. This did not have quotes around the value, and so it was interpreted as multiple columns.
  • MappedInteger also suffered in the same way, since they use string labels that could contain commas.
  • In all cases now, when a value contains a comma, then it will have quotes around it.

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8.1.13 October 18, 2016

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Permission export included extraneous database directives
• BUGFIX: Update workflow action exception on copying value from null biskit
  • On updating a Booking.owner to be whatever the project.owner is, we got an exception when the project was null. That is, this was for a resource that did not use projects.
  • The update now works properly after this fix. Whether a null booking owner makes sense is a different matter.
• BUGFIX: if permissions hide global prefs from all, even root can't log in
• BUGFIX: Asking for history on a now-extinct biskit type gave exception

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8.1.14 October 31, 2016

Changes

• Automatically trim leading and trailing spaces from email addresses
  • Previously, users could enter an email address with leading or trailing spaces, and it wouldn't be noticed, but it would cause emails to fail.
  • This change now automatically and silently trims leading and trailing spaces from email addresses when you enter them in the new user registration page.
• Add support for pseudo-property "biskitType" in a formula where you want to access the biskit type of a biskit-valued property.
  • If you have a biskit-valued property called someBiskitProp, then a formula can now refer to [someBiskitProp.biskitType] to return the biskit type of the biskit contained by someBiskitProp.
• Add support for renumbering workflow events and actions
  • Sometimes when you add/delete/copy/paste events and actions onto a workflow, the numbering leaves "holes".
  • There's now a button that's visible while editing a workflow to be able to renumber all the events and actions so they are numbered contiguously
• Workflow events are now sorted according to their "sort order" property so they have a guaranteed execution order.
  • Previously, workflow events fired in any order.
  • Note that it does not matter which workflow an event is in; if two workflow events can be triggered by the same thing that happens in the system, then the one with the lowest sort order will be executed first.
• New Find Text Workflow Action
  • This replaces the old "Regex Workflow Action".
  • This can now do a find-and-replace within some text, normally using a plain text search string, but optionally it can search for a regular expressions.
  • This can still parse text to extract pieces of it using a regular expression to identify the part(s) you wanted. This was what the old Regex Workflow Action did.

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Refresh login page sometimes caused login request with null user
  • When first going to Calpendo, if you were not logged in, the login page would show. Sometimes, a login request would be automatically sent to the server with a user name of null and no authentication method selected.

• BUGFIX: Bad permissions could hide all authentication modes preventing log in

• BUGFIX: Occasional IndexOutOfBounds setting up character sets using file import

• BUGFIX: Exception creating booking that repeats weekly until BEFORE booking start
  • On creating a booking, if you make it weekly repeating and set a date that the repeat terminates which is before the booking's start date, then you got an exception.
• BUGFIX: Injecting list of strings into workflow forgot terminating "]"
  • When using a TemplatedTextWorkflowAction or an EmailWorkflowAction to inject a list of strings into the output text, it would be displayed with an opening square bracket and a comma-separated list of values.
  • However, it did not append the closing square bracket.

• BUGFIX: TemplatedTextWorkflowAction inserted wrong text for "URL"

• BUGFIX: Templated text replaced unrecognised tags instead of ignoring them
  • If, in an Email Workflow Action or a Templated Text Workflow Action, you have something like this: [foo] in the template, then this would cause it to look for something with the name foo. If it's not found, then it was replaced with "".
  • However, that means that any random text that happens to match this kind of pattern would also be replaced by .
  • This fix changes things so that if a tag is not recognised as a valid path, instead of it being replaced by <not found>, it is left as it was. However, it is recognised as a valid path, then a null or missing value will still be reported as <not found>, as before.

• BUGFIX: ExprodoDB anonymous HTTP did not work

• BUGFIX: Bakery tool for executing SQL code mishandled // characters

  • A // is treated as a comment for the rest of the current line. However, it should not be treated as a comment when it's in the middle of a quoted string.

  • For example:

    insert into my_table set url='http://server/';
    

  would give a syntax error if everything from the // were ignored.

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8.1.15 November 9, 2016

Changes

• Add support for optionally not forcing a logout when an IP address changes
  • This is for those networks that are configured to change the apparent IP address being used by a browser.
  • We normally treat that as a likely hack attempt and so automatically log users out when the same session is used from multiple IP addresses.
  • This can now optionally be disabled for networks that normally have unstable IP addresses.
  • This is in global preferences under the Security tab.
• Add support for remote user identification & authorisation for actual usage
  • This is a part of being able to record actual usage of PCs on the network typically because they're driving some related instrument
  • This means there are two new workflow events "Remote Authorisation Request" and "Remote User Identification Request" to help with identifying a user and authorising them to use the remote PC.
• Add support for new workflow action called "Type Cast"
  • Sometimes, you have a biskit that the system knows is a particular type.
  • However, you may either know for certain or know that sometimes the biskit is actually an instance of some sub-type.
  • Further, you may want to use some of the properties that are available on the sub-type, but are unable to do so because the system only knows the biskit by its base type.
  • This action lets you check whether a biskit has a particular type, and it only runs the child actions if the biskit does have that type. The child actions can then treat the biskit as having that subtype, which means you have access to all the properties that exist on the subtype.
• Add support for less than/greater than comparison of mapped int properties
  • Any integer-valued property that is a mapped int would previously only allow conditions that did an equals or not-equals comparison against some other value.
  • It now allows less than/greater than comparisons.
  • This uses the underlying integer value for the comparison.
  • It is sometimes sensible to use the underlying integer in this way, depending on how the mapped integer has been configured.

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Exprodo SDM gave an exception on saving a sequence to which you had just added a new task

• BUGFIX: Upgrade from 7.0 to 8.1.14 failed

• BUGFIX: A MappedString property that used to be an integer property caused an exception on showing update history

• BUGFIX: searching for PropertyDef sometimes returns fewer than it should

• BUGFIX: Different calendars were not kept in date sync

• BUGFIX: auto emails cached UserGroup membership and user email addresses
  • If you changed a user's email address or records of who is in each user group, then the system would not notice when sending out automated emails. It would use the old group membership and the user's old email address.
  • This fix also supports any such changes to users being made directly in the database.
• BUGFIX: Excess hidden when Process content is bigger than available space
  • When using a stepped-editor process, if the editor needed more display space than the current browser window allowed, then there was no way to see the items that went off-screen.
  • The fix now means scrollbars appear when necessary.
• BUGFIX: Hiding left nav bar on calendars did not cause remainder to resize
  • In a week view, the gaps between the days got bigger rather than making each day a little wider to take advantage of the space.
• BUGFIX: Some workflow actions didn't advertise inherited output properties
  • All actions and events generate output that includes a common set of properties. Some actions did not advertise the existence of this common set of properties, and so could not be used in a workflow.
  • This affected these workflow actions:
    • Biskit Create
    • Diff
    • For Each
    • List Extract
    • Type Cast
• BUGFIX: Some old automatic emails were converted badly for upgrade to 8.0

  • This means that emails sent out would not have been able to fill in data from the database properly. For example, when you receive an email to tell you that a new user has just registered, the email would not include the name of the user, as it should, but instead would include some text that was our internal placeholder for the name.

  • Any customer that first received a version of Calpendo or Exprodo from 2.1.5 to 6.2.x ended up with an Automatic Email that was later converted to an 8.0 database incorrectly. Anybody starting at 2.1.4 or earlier, or 7.0 and later, was converted correctly.

  • This fix addresses the problem for everybody.

• BUGFIX: Exception setting up a Process Definition for a target biskit that has a layout which contains a tab without a name

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8.1.16 November 30, 2016

Changes

• Sort third party licence file tabs alphabetically in the UI

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Some errors were not emailed home
  • Whenever there is an unexpected exception, an automated report is emailed back to Exprodo Software. There's a global preference to turn this off if you want to, although we much prefer everybody leave this on so that we can find out about bugs without people having to report them to us.
  • There were some parts of the code that were handling exceptions in a different way, and these were generating an automated exception report.
• BUGFIX: Exception on clicking edit with some BiskitUpdate actions
  • Whenever a BiskitUpdate action is configured to update an AnonymousHTTP response, or a RemoteUserAuthorisation result or a RemoteUserIdentification result, editing the workflow gives an error if the last displayed action is the BiskitUpdate.
• BUGFIX: Remote user identification & authorisation output not settable

  • There was no way to update the results onto these output biskits because we needed to change a value on the output itself. So it would be the output biskit that should be the target of the Biskit Update action, but it doesn't offer that option.

  • So this commit moves the parts of the output biskit that are intended to be modified by the workflow to a child biskit.

• BUGFIX: Downgrades from 8.1.15 to 8.1.14 failed due to missing script

• BUGFIX: Predefined slots rule did not check single-day booking finish time
  • When faced with a booking that was not multi-day, then the booking could finish on a time that was no in accordance with the slots configured and the rule would not complain.
• BUGFIX: Creating a new biskit which contained a shallow property could generate an exception.
  • This was quite rare, but possible when creating a copy of another biskit
• BUGFIX: Copying a Booking which had properties hidden from you resulted in a Booking pop-up containing unmodifiable properties.
  • There was no way to choose a value of these properties, even though you are creating a new object.
  • This applied to the bookings, templates, resource usage calendars in Calpendo, and the events calendar in Exprodo SDM.

• BUGFIX: Safari could generate login request without specifying the authentication method

• BUGFIX: A repeat template or booking that ends at midnight disappears as it goes into the past.
  • As each instance of a repeat booking or template goes into the past, a new booking/template is created to represent the instance that's just gone into the past, and the repeat is modified so it starts at the next repeat instance.
  • This means you are left with a record in the past of what bookings/templates actually looked like at the time.
  • Any that ended at midnight would not have the version in the past created.
  • Any multi-day repeat bookings that go into the past would record a single-day version of the booking.

• BUGFIX: Deadlock while saving a project if there is a workflow that also modifies the project, and the user saving the project is one of its users.

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8.1.17 December 1, 2016

Changes

• Optimisation: cache timezone information for ical feed generation
  • This used to regenerate it every time, which took some time to prepare.
  • It now keeps a copy and regenerates it once per day.

Security Bug Fixes

• SECURITY BUGFIX: PrivilegedSearch allowed anybody to run a search
  • Nobody is using this in production yet, so the security implications are not important.

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Changes to RelativeTime workflow did not take effect until reboot
• BUGFIX: MappedInt property history gave exception if type used to be a string
  • If you have a string property on a biskit, and then make changes to the biskit so there's some history behind it
  • And then you change that string property to a Mapped Int
  • And then you look at the history of the biskit you changed
  • Then you would get an exception.
• BUGFIX: Infinite loop was possible when logging a system event that caused an error that caused a system event to be logged.
• BUGFIX: Import page wouldn't let you add import filter conditions
• BUGFIX: ClassCastException comparing shallow & non-shallow biskits

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8.1.18 December 17, 2016

Changes

• Record the server thread that logs each system event
  • This helps to make sense of logs when you have multiple threads that are logging at the same time.
  • When looking at the system events page, it now shows the thread names.
• When using the API to generate HTML versions of data, we now display property paths rather than property labels.
  • For example, if you used a query that asked for some biskits and for particular paths available from those biskits, such as asking for bookings and wanting status and project.status, it would include "Status" and "Status" for the labels on the properties respectively.

  Whereas it now shows "status" and "project.status" instead.

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: ical bookings could confuse outlook's daylight savings handling
  • All booking dates are now in UTC
  • This should make it easier for other calendar clients to daylight savings correctly.
• BUGFIX: exception on save bookmark with "Show bookings" unticked
  • If you add a resource to a Calpendo bookmark, and there are any resources that are part of that bookmark, but that should not have their bookings displayed by default, then the save would generate an exception.

• BUGFIX: The API generated badly formatted JSON when asking for a list of biskits and you specify a list of properties you want to see for each biskit found.

• BUGFIX: Exception using the API for some requests
  • If you ask for a list of biskits and specify property paths that you want downloaded for each biskit found, and one of those paths goes through a biskit that is null, then you would get an exception.
  • For example, ask for the path "project.owner.id" when searching for bookings on a resource that does not use projects, so the project would be null.
• BUGFIX: API wrote out illegal JSON when property values were null
  • If you have a booking for a resource that takes no project, and then ask the API to give you bookings and to show the project.id and project.status, then it would present JSON that used "id" and "status" as the keys for project.id and project.status.
  • This was confusing and, if there was already an "id" and "status", illegal JSON due to having repeated keys.

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8.1.19 January 11, 2017

Security Bug Fixes

• SECURITY BUGFIX: Report content redaction could go wrong
  • This bug has the potential to allow existing users to access data that they should not be allowed to see. It could only be exploited if permissions were configured a certain way, and that includes adding permissions that allow the special user "nobody" to view data that other users cannot.
  • We have always recommended not to allow user "nobody" to have read access to data that is normally private. It may sometimes be configured that way because anything sent by email must be readable by "nobody" or else it will be redacted from the email, regardless of who sends the email or to whom it is sent.
  • There are two modes in which this bug could be manifested.
    1. Displaying data that should be redacted
    2. Redacting data that should be visible
  • In order for this bug to allow data to be displayed that should be redacted, it requires user "nobody" to have special read access privileges to data that would normally be hidden. It also requires the permissions to have been configured a certain way.
  • In order to redact data that should be visible, it also requires permissions to be configured a certain way, but does not require any particular permissions for user "nobody". It also requires that the report be run by somebody who is not the owner of the report.

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Exception creating time slot booking when no bookings yet in browser
• BUGFIX: Occasional exception on handling an expired session
• BUGFIX: System events page showed only one category
• BUGFIX: Exception on creating repeat with some of it in the past
  • If you create a repeat booking and have the first instance of it starting today, but before now, and continuing after today,
  • then you get a problem on handling that. It's because there is no old version of the booking in the database, and this is not handled well.
• BUGFIX: BookingPopup defaulted to 'only selected resources' when no resources selected
• BUGFIX: template, rules and past bookings checks failed when no resources are selected
• BUGFIX: Exception updating a report with a schedule and no next send due
• BUGFIX: Upgrading through 7.0.45 could fail in MySQL 5.7.5 and later
• BUGFIX: Permissions would sometimes not show selected property paths
  • This happened when viewing a permission, depending on what permissions you had edited beforehand.

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8.1.20 January 26, 2017

Changes

• System events relating to workflows now show the event/action stack trace with times, so you can see how long things take to run
• Log system events on starting workflow event/action, not just on finish.
  • This makes it easier to understand what happened when looking over the system event record of workflows.

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: IntervalRule didn't allow you to match the main booking resource

• BUGFIX: Interval rule incorrectly calculated gap to preceeding bookings

• BUGFIX: dynamic biskit base class broken when not sharing table with sub-types

• BUGFIX: Formulaic properties not updated for workflows triggered by update

• BUGFIX: RelativeTimeWorkflowEvent set bad time when relative to date property
  • It worked okay when you set it to be relative to a date/time property, but with a date property, you get to choose the time of day when the event will fire.
  • Saving the displayed time-of-day worked okay, but when the browser displayed the value saved, it would get it wrong. Saving again would then cause the value saved to be wrong.
• BUGFIX: Veto workflow action did not cause immediate stop to processing
  • A user action may trigger multiple workflow events. Each event should be treated as independent since there is no guarantee about the order in which events are executed.
  • However, each event's processing should stop as soon as there is a veto, and the final veto exception should be whichever veto was thrown first, if there was one.

• BUGFIX: Workflow collections function failed if given a set instead of list

• BUGFIX: Delay workflow events failed after executing first child action

• BUGFIX: Delayed workflow actions could cause other events not to run

• BUGFIX: Exception writing a null property for templated text workflow action

• BUGFIX: Delay workflow actions hid some values from before the delay

• BUGFIX: Rebuilding context after delay workflow action failed on metaproperties

• BUGFIX: biskit update workflow action said old value identical to new value
  • When you update a biskit, it generates output for child actions to use. It is supposed to say what the old value of the biskit was, before the update, as well as provide the updated version. However, it would sometimes get this wrong, and the old value would be the same as the new value when it shouldn't be.
• BUGFIX: workflow functions sometimes lie about their output contents
  • Some functions generate different types of output depending on the type of their inputs. For example the function "first" is given a list of biskits and returns the first biskit in the list. The returned biskit type is declared to be whatever the type of the list is.
  • However, the user interface cached the returned type so it didn't have to calculate it next time.
  • So if you have a workflow in which the "first" function is used twice, then the second one will think it's return type is the same as the first one, even though it may be given a list containing a different type biskits.
  • This bug would sometimes prevent you from creating a the workflow you wanted, but did not affect the performance of workflows that you did create.

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8.1.21 February 2, 2017

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Could not generate biskit defs SQL from anything with a Biskit List
• BUGFIX: bakery lost primary keys of MappedInt/MappedString values
  • This meant that when you edit/save without evening making a change, it would change all the primary keys for the mapped int values or mapped string values.
• BUGFIX: Modules had errors not taking into account 8.0 biskit type rename
  • This meant loading and unloading the services and related modules did not work in 8.1
• BUGFIX: Deadlock while reloading database config from the bakery
  • This bug has been around for at least 18 months and is hard to trigger, having happened only once in all that time.
  • When asking the bakery to reload the database config, if there was an error being logged due to something else happening from a different user, and it happened at exactly the right time, then it could cause a deadlock where two threads were waiting for each other to finish before they could continue.
• BUGFIX: Editing a user to add a project would yield no change to projects
  • This bug was introduced in 8.1.20 as a result of a fix for a bug with formulaic properties whose old value was being inserted into emails instead of a new version.

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8.1.22 February 23, 2017

Security Bug Fixes

• SECURITY BUGFIX: Permissions didn't match ExprodoUser to CalpendoUser
  • When a permission says it applies to a user from a particular path, or does not apply to a particular path, we fetch the user from that path at runtime. We then compare that to the current user.
  • In Calpendo, the current user is always an instance of CalpendoUser. However, it is possible that the user referenced by the path could resolve to an ExprodoUser. It is technically the same user, but it might not notice that it's really an ExprodoUser.
  • When this happens, the permission would not be handled correctly.
  • It is, however, very rare that this situation would arise.

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: NPE with condition comparing to biskit that happens to be null

• BUGFIX: Workflow events fired relative to a date prop fired at wrong time
  • This was only a problem when relative to a date property and not when relative to a date/time property.
  • It was confusing minutes for seconds and so fired the event at the wrong time of day.
  • It was also miscalculating when working out a range of times that would need to be on a biskit if it were to trigger within a given period of time.
• BUGFIX: NumberOfBookings & PredefinedSlots rules failed on booking subtypes
  • If you declared either of these worked on a booking subtype, and then used a condition that referenced a property that exists on a booking subtype, the rule would fail at runtime.

• BUGFIX: "retry as booking request" didn't work with tentative bookings

• BUGFIX: AdvancedRule LazyInitializationException with nested biskits

  • An AdvancedRule lets you fetch properties from the booking, such as its project, and then properties from its project. The booking and project were guaranteed to be fully loaded from the database, but not properties on the project.

  • So if there was a biskit-valued property on the project, you might try and access properties on it and have it fail with a LazyInitializationException.

  • This is now fixed by making sure Calpendo always has an active session for connecting to the database so that everything works transparently.

• BUGFIX: ical entry for repeat bookings missed last recurrence
  • For a booking that repeated daily with the last occurence on, say Feb 24th, the ical feed would say that the event went until Feb 23rd.
  • This appears to be a rounding error which has been fixed by calculating the date/time of the end of the last occurence, and using that in the ical feed.
• BUGFIX: negating conditions ("none of" and "not all") broke with nulls
  • If you have a condition like "none of [value of x = 5]", then for a biskit where x is null, you would expect it to include it, but it would not.
  • This was because it generated SQL like (not(x = 5)) but SQL like that never includes null values.
  • Whenever we want to negate something like (x=5), we now do the equivalent of ((x is null) or (x != 5)).
• BUGFIX: Rule validator not show NumberOfBookings rule message on rejection
  • When the rule validator rejects a booking, it should show the message it would display to the user. When run against a NumberOfBookingsRule, it would not show any message, despite the correct message being delivered outside the rule validator, in the normal run of events.

• BUGFIX: The iCal feed failed if a booking's resource was not accessible to user "nobody"

• BUGFIX: The template editor gave no clues about the existence of any template groups if you gave them an empty name. This editor now shows "(unnamed)".

• BUGFIX: Holiday Rule didn't work with multi-day bookings

Changes

• Do not report "upload in progress" error from AttachmentCollectionWidget
• Do not treat veto actions as an error (so do not log an error)
• Add debug logging to help work out when create bookings with finish < start
  • It should not be possible to create a booking with a start date after the finish date.
  • But we sometimes get an error where this is attempted.
  • It seems to happen when there are predefined slots, and when there are some bookings already present. But it's not clear exactly what the issue is.
  • Analysis of a previous error suggests a pre-existing booking with a finish time before the start time, but no such booking could be found nor should be possible.
  • This change adds extra information to the exception message that should help diagnose the issue when it next occurs.

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8.1.23 March 6, 2017

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Advanced rules were run with "booking" set to null
  • This fixes a bug introduced in 8.1.22 in which creating a booking resulted in that booking not being set when running an advanced rule.

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8.1.24 March 9, 2017

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Workflows sometimes get permissions wrong when updating data
  • The permissions that apply when a workflow runs can be a bit tricky, because they are sometimes run as a direct consequence of a real user and sometimes they are not.
  • This bug fixes the way this works in some cases.
  • This problem only applied to changes made by workflows.
• BUGFIX: Workflows could fail when running two things at the same time
  • We keep a record of the last time a workflow event or action ran.
  • If two things happened at the same time so that the same event or action was run concurrently, then they would both fail with an error.

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8.1.25 March 16, 2017

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Copying a booking did not also copy the booking owner

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8.1.26 March 17, 2017

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Deadlock prevention could cause an infinite loop sending emails
• BUGFIX: Exception on saving global preferences (since 8.1.24)

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8.1.27 March 31, 2017

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Total Time Booked Rule was broken by multi-day bookings change
  • Any Total Time Booked Rule that was specifying which times of day to include in the calculation were broken if those times-of-day were specified using repeating settings.
  • It is normal to use repeats for setting this up, so this was a problem.

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8.1.28 April 4, 2017

Changes

• Prevent accidental downgrade of the database by going back to an older version.
  • Small bugfix release upgrades will automatically be rolled back.
  • Larger release upgrades will only be rolled back with manual intervention.
  • If you are prevented from downgrading, the error message you receive will tell you exactly what you need to know if you really want the downgrade.
  • This measure is here to prevent accidental data destruction by inadvertently running an older version of the software against a newer database.

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8.1.29 April 11th, 2017

Security Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Empty and null collections were seen as different
  • Within workflows, it is possible to generate an update that does not change a property that contains a collection of biskits, and for the value of that property to be seen as null.
  • The old value of that property would be seen as an empty set.
  • For collections of values like this, null and the empty set are semantically identical and should always be treated the same.
  • However, they were seen as different and so the permissions system would not behave in the manner expected or prescribed.
  • It is likely that this only affects permissions for actions run in a workflow, and that the preconditions necessary for this to occur are rare and with limited impact.

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: NetworkMessageAction did not parse biskit properties
  • This workflow action send text to a remote server.
  • It accepts text which can be a template containing values it extracts from biskits, much like TemplatedTextWorkflowAction.
  • However, the replacing of values in the template did not occur so that the raw template was sent to the remote server.
• BUGFIX: Exception with some reports with data hidden by permissions
  • When permissions deny EXISTS permission on a biskit, and a group report has a column that would show such a biskit, were it not hidden, then you would get an exception.

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8.1.30 April 13th, 2017

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: BiskitUpdate workflow action would not let you set a property value to null

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8.1.31 April 28th, 2017

Security Bug Fixes

• SECURITY BUGFIX: normally hidden data could be read

  • This is a serious problem, the details of which will not be published in these release notes so that system administrators can be notified of the problem and given chance to fix it.

  • It involves a way for a user to be able to read data that they should be denied access to.

  • Anybody may request further details. If you are requesting such details a long time from when this was written, please quote this reference:

    f5ca71cbb79aa3fdde84302f5d5cbe5c12d27830
    

• SECURITY BUGFIX: Possible to create pre-approved user without admin approval
  • It was possible for a non-admin user to create another user that was already approved and could allow somebody else to log in.
  • This problem did not allow anybody to create a user with more roles that the original user had.
  • Exploiting this required modification of the client HTML.
  • This change fixes the problem on the server and does not rely on the client to be well behaved.
• SECURITY BUGFIX: LoginAttempt EXISTS permission allowed for all
  • Non-admin users could see how many login attempts there had been in total.
  • They couldn't see any more than that, but they shouldn't really have been able to do that much.
  • The fix for this is to create an additional permission that denies EXISTS rights on LoginAttempt instances for non-admin users.

Security Hardening

• Prevent non-admins from accessing system events
  • This adds a new permission to deny EXISTS on system events to non-admins
  • This is because there may be information stored in system events that should not be generally accessible.
• Added entropy in temporary file random key to improve security on file downloads
  • When you export a report and download it, there's a random key assigned that is used in the export.
  • If an attacker were to guess (or bruteforce) the key, it would potentially allow them to download a report somebody else had run and exported for download.
  • There were 6 numeric digits with 900,000 possible values for this key (about 19 bits).
  • The key has now been extended to 16 characters with 62 possible values each, making 10^28 possible values and about 95 bits, making a brute force attack much less likely to succeed.

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: Selecting Bookmark page from menu gave exception

• BUGFIX: Sort workflow action failed when given an empty collection to sort

• BUGFIX: Conditions on custom biskit properties on Registers workflow biskit failed

• BUGFIX: Exported permissions upgrade script mal-quoted database directive
  • This applies to a hidden page that can generate SQL for copying permissions from one system to another. This will eventually be part of a means of exporting configuration plugins from one system that can be imported into another.
  • The generated upgrade script for permissions put single quotes around the permission name in the permission directive part, which it should not.
  • It meant that it was looking for a permission with a name that started and ended with a single quote.
• BUGFIX: Exported permission downgrade script mishandled null subject prop
  • The downgrade script generated by the same permissions exporter as the above would match a pre-existing permission's subjectProperty with "=null" if it was supposed to be null.
  • This doesn't work for null values, and needed to be "is null" instead.

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8.1.32 April 29th, 2017

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: TemporaryFile.randomKey did not set its string property type

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