2024.4 Release Highlights

The Fuuz engineering team isn’t fooling you with this month’s release - it’s packed with great features and improvements we’re excited to share. Read on to learn more!

Integration Request Logging

One of the larger initiatives we’ve been undertaking has been to improve the visibility and logging in the Fuuz platform. For example, last year, we added authentication event logging; later this year, we plan to add detailed API trace logging. In support of that push, this month’s release includes a new log screen which shows all outbound requests made through our integration platform in a unified format, indicating who made the request, which connection was used, how long the request took, and the error message returned (if any).

Integration Request Logs table.

Much of this information may have been (and still is) available in the Data Flow Logs screen; but the information there wasn’t comprehensive, and the log format may have varied depending on the data flow the log originated from. This new screen creates a unified view of all requests, even ones which don’t originate from data flows, which is helpful when auditing connector usage and external API request volumes.

There are lots of improvements to come for this feature; for example, it doesn’t currently log request or response payload information, which is something we plan to add soon to further aid with resolving integration issues when they occur.

Field Value Rounding

You may recall from the February 2024 release notes that we added support for _aggregate queries two months ago. One of the gaps we identified early on was the fact that aggregate queries grouping by date fields would group by the exact millisecond - not very helpful for reporting on transactional data, where you’d typically want to group by the hour, day, or even month.

The April 2024 release includes a feature which solves that problem, and offers some extra API functionality for free: the ability to round date and numeric field values directly in the API!

For example, let’s say we wanted to create a report summarizing the total time spent in each workcenter mode in the Fuuz MES app. We can now apply a round argument to the occurAt field, specifying that we want to round to by week - or by hour, day, month, or any other unit of time. The API framework will automatically round to the specified date unit, group by mode, and compute the sum of the duration, ready to display in a table or visualization.

Combined with the pivot and row aggregation features already present in the table view system, this supports the creation of reports and snapshot screens based on transactional data like workcenter history:

A table displaying total time spent in a workcenter mode by week and workcenter.

For the moment, this feature is somewhat tricky to use in the screen designer - something we plan to address in Q2 - but it’s available as an API feature in this release for use in data flows, documents, and screens which run custom queries. We also plan to use this feature as the foundation of a new visualization builder down the road.

Mutation Builder Input

The 2024.4 release also includes a long-awaited improvement to the query builder: it now supports building mutations! In the API explorer, users can simply click the Mutation Builder button, select the model and mutation type, and optionally select which fields to return, and have a simple mutation generated for them.

Mutation builder in action.

This same feature is also available in the Action element in the Screen Designer, and in Mutate nodes in the Flow Designer.

More Highlights

Draft Version Restrictions

The April 2024 release introduces a change we’ve been planning for some time: it limits the designers to only one draft (undeployed) version for each component (screen, flow, etc.) This change might cause some confusion, especially if a component has older draft versions hanging around that need to be deleted before work can be continued from the “latest” version. The decision to apply this limitation was made for a few reasons:

• The possibility of creating more than one draft version by, for example, opening the current deployed rather than current draft version of a flow or screen introduced a lot of room for errors: deploying the wrong set of changes, not deploying all pending changes, an unclear version history, etc. One draft version pushes all work to happen on the same draft instead.

• As part of our ongoing work to simplify app development in Fuuz, we’re trying to reduce the number of things a user of the platform needs to worry about - and versioning is one of those. Our goal is to automatically version and deploy changes wherever possible in the future, and eliminating the possibility of multiple draft versions brings us closer to that goal.

• The most common legitimate use for the ability to save one-off versions was to create a “copy” of a component for testing some changes or debugging. Unfortunately, those versions often still caused the same confusion mentioned above, and could cause significant trouble if they were accidentally deployed. Instead, we’ve added support for copying the entire component to each designer’s file menu, supporting that use case in a way that clearly separates the copied changes from the original screen.

The new Save a Copy action in the Flow Designer.

Fuuz Browser Extension V3 Manifest Beta

Google Chrome has announced a major platform version update for browser extensions they’re referring to as “Manifest V3”. This update necessitates significant changes to many extensions, and the Fuuz Browser Extension is no exception. Given the risks involved in big updates like this, we’ve packaged a beta version of the extension our customers can use to test the new Manifest V3 version of the browser extension prior to its production release to the Chrome Web Store, which will occur along with the 2024.5 release on 5/21. You can download that beta version from our public S3 bucket.

For more information on installing an unpacked extension from a ZIP archive, check out our documentation on installing a beta version of the Fuuz Browser Extension.

Full Release Notes: 2024.4.0

Data Team

Security

• Updated Sequence and Application Configuration screens to disable non-editable fields on Application tenants

• Updated all designers to only permit one draft (undeployed) version of a given app component at a time

GraphQL APIs

• Added round arguments to numeric (Int, Float) and date (Date, Time, and DateTime) fields to support rounding the values returned

• Updated error message when deleting a document that’s referenced elsewhere to include additional information on what is referencing it

DevOps Team

Cluster Infrastructure

• Implemented event-based service scaling to scale infrequently used services to zero replicas while not in use

Integration Team

Device Gateway

• Added origin metadata to TCP client flow executions to identify source device and host

• Removed the ability to sign in to the gateway with a username and password to automatically create an API key

• Fixed an error caused by a race condition in the setup process for store-and-forward

Integration Platform

• Added integration request logging system and screens to track all requests through the integration platform

• Added TecCom File Upload connector for TecCom Business Cloud

• Corrected a bug on the Webhooks screen with users with access to multiple enterprise environments

Subscription Service

• Added access control policy actions and resources for subscribing and publishing to topics via websockets

• Updated to latest Socket.io server library version

Orchestration Team

Script Editor

• Added formatter support for JSONata script editors, accessible via the Actions menu or Alt+F hotkey

• Added an option to switch the output panel from a console-style view to a JSON code viewer

Package System

• Updated Package Definition Editor to lock package definition versions when exported, requiring a new version to be created when further changes are made

• Corrected a bug limiting the package record selector to the first 1000 records

User Interface Team

Framework

• Updated system screen menu sidebars to better organize screens

• Updated avatar hover menu to contextually link to relevant system screen menus based on tenant type

  • Updated loading backdrops so they no longer cover error snackbars

Screen Designer

• Added an indicator to the controls bar to warn the user that the version they’re viewing is not the latest and provide a quick link to navigate to the latest draft

• Added support for nesting forms and cards within other forms and cards

• Added the ability to search properties and property values in the Property Editor panel

• Added a Generate New Version action to re-generate a table or form from a template

• Added a Keyboard Type property to Text inputs to provide a hint to mobile devices as to what kind of virtual keyboard to display

• Updated to prevent deleting the last tab on a screen

• Updated table columns to set the correct format when selecting a field from the picker

• Updated input element Label property to be transformable to allow dynamic field labels

• Corrected a bug causing the screen designer to get stuck when creating a new screen

Application Designer

• Added “Recently Closed” section to the Navigator panel

Components

• Added a new “multi-type” input for use in schema-driven UIs that accept variable types for the same property (e.g. integer or string)

• Added support for building mutations to the GraphQL input in the API explorer, mutate nodes, and screen actions

• Corrected an issue with the default additional query fields on Image elements