Release Notes For Version 6.1

Table Of Contents

• New Features
  • Number of Bookings Rule
  • Interval Rule
  • Duration Rule
  • Other Rule Changes
  • Importing Data
  • Reporting Changes
• Minor New Features
• Changes
• Old-Style Searches and Privacy

New Features

Number of Bookings Rule

This is a new rule type that limits the total number of bookings that can be made. For example, you can limit the number of approved/requested bookings for each project. This can be a fixed limit, or you can select the limit from the project's settings.

Interval Rule

This is a new rule type that lets you specify that the time between some (or all) bookings must be at least a particular time. This can be used to enforce gaps between all bookings, or to prevent projects that overheat the scanner from following each other too closely.

Duration Rule

This is a new rule type that lets you specify the acceptable duration of each booking. This can be a fixed value or it can use a value specified in the project's settings.

Other Rule Changes

Also, the way the rule Applies To and Does Not Apply To tabs work in the rule editor has changed. For example, the Projects sub-tab allows you to specify individual projects, project types and project groups. Previously, if you added items in more than one of these sections, then all the sections you entered had to be true. So if you specified that a rule applies to project P and project group G, then the rule would only apply to bookings for project P is P was also a member of group G. This is not a sensible way to work, and so the logic has now been changed so that when you enter values into multiple sections of a tab, then it now requires that any of those be true, not all of them.

This will change the behaviour of any rule that entered items into multiple sections within a tab.

There are some limited cases where the old behaviour may be what you want. For example, if you have a project group with many projects in it, you may want a rule only to apply when the project is in that group and also has a particular project type. To achieve this, specify the project group in the Projects tab, and then add a condition in the conditions tab to require that the project type be what you want.

Importing Data

There's now support for importing data from CSV files. This can be used, for example, to import bookings or projects.

Reporting Changes

The Group Report now offers more options for aggregating values:

• You can now display the standard deviation of a numeric valued column.
• You can now choose min, max, average or standard deviation of date and date/time properties. Standard deviation in milliseconds.
• You can now count the number of distinct values of a property in a report.
• Null values can optionally be ignored when calculating sum/min/max/average/standard deviation in a report

Also, reports now run faster than before. This is particularly noticeable for large reports.

Minor New Features

• Requiring that a project can only book a resource if that project has an entry in its resource settings for the relevant resource.
  • You specify this in the resource editor.
  • You could always choose whether a project was required or not.
  • There are now three options: project not required, project required, and project required with an entry for that resource.
• If you add custom properties that are numbers, you can now assign them units. There are default units of length, time, weight and temperature, although you can add your own in the bakery.
• Date and date time properties can now be defaulted to null or to now or a specific value.
• You can now add an item to the menu that will take you to a search page with custom search widgets displayed. For example, if you add a custom property to Bookings, then you might want to replace the bookings search page with a search page that makes it easy for people to search for your bookings by specifying values for your custom property.
• You can now add an item to the menu that will immediately run a pre-saved report.
• When you start Calpendo, it opens the bookings calendar by default. You now have the option to choose a different default starting page.
• When entering dates, you have always had the option to select dates using a drop-down or to type the date in that you want. For those dates where the format you type in is ambiguous, there's now an option to indicate whether the date parser should prefer US or European date formats. Each user has their own setting, and there's a global setting that applies to new users.
• Since Calpendo 6.0, you've been able to require that passwords contain an upper case letter, a lower case letter or some other options. You now have the additional option of requiring that passwords contain a letter of any case. This is in Admin->Global Preferences->Security
• There's now much better control over whether changes to old bookings are allowed or not.
  • Previously, it was either allowed or not. If it was allowed, then you needed permissions to control exactly what was allowed.
  • You now have more options. For example, you can choose whether some or any changes are allowed while a booking is in progress. After a booking has finished, you can now choose whether to allow any or some changes, and if so for how long. In this context, if "some changes" are allowed, it means that you can change anything apart from the start/finish times, status and resource. You can also choose to allow any changes for a certain period, and then some changes for a while, and then no more changes thereafter.
• There's now an option to require users to enter a reason for cancelling bookings. This is specified in the resource editor. The options a user will be given for the cancellation reason are the Resource Usage Outcome values. These are configured in the Types and Groups editor.
• You can now specify the roles that new users will be given by default. This is in Admin->Global Preferences->Users.

Changes

• Calendar pages now work better on tablet devices.
• Timed-out user sessions are now deleted. Previously, the same session would be re-use when you re-enter your password. Logging out also deletes your session information. This will probably have little or no impact on users.
• Some fields were limited to 255 characters, and this limit has been removed. For example:
  • The subject on an automatic email
  • Booking description
  • Project description
• The time templates calendar now shows templates with a border colour indicative of the resource they belong to.
• The list of projects menu items available under the Admin and Projects menus have been removed. You can still re-add them in using the menu editor should you wish, but their functionality is superceded by the project search page which shows a list of approved projects by default.
• The list of users menu item available under the Admin menu has been removed in favour of a new menu item "User Search". This works much like the project search and booking search pages, and initially shows a list of approved users.

Old-Style Searches and Privacy

The old search page should no longer be used and will be removed in a future version. The new search introduced in Calpendo 6.0 now offers everything that the old search did, but is much better and easier to use. Calpendo now sends back to Conaptic information about usage of the old search system so that we can make sure it's not being used before it is removed, and to help those using it to migrate to the new search style.

To help with this, there's a new option in Admin->Global Preferences->General to allow you to control whether this usage information is sent to Conaptic. This is only used to monitor usage of the old search system, and this will be removed when the old search system is removed.