ViewsFlash 2.8 Release Notes

Release 2.8 is a major release combining features from intermediate releases 2.6 and 2.7. Main enhacements are:

Simplified UI. Pages with many options now offer a toggle for Fewer Choices and More Choices.

Additional Response options. Specify different actions after duplicate voting, missing or invalid data, poll closed. Showing different pages and redirecting the browser are possible.

Question skipping. In a survey, when a visitor clicks on a "no" answer, for example, the voting form scrolls to the indicated next question.

Additional question types. Radio buttons and checkboxes can now be laid out across (horizontally) or down (vertically).

Bulk Voting. When a web site poll is complemented by a live TV or radio show, that invites visitors to vote using an 800 number, this feature adds the votes from the 800 service to the online web totals in one single screen, with an appropriate audit trail. The Web Services API can then construct a TV-ready image to complete the simulcast.

XML. Style Templates can be written in XML. An extension of the Web Services API allows expressing the survey or poll as XML, which can be parsed by other applications.

Ratings Comparisons. The ratings system can now automatically display comparisons between items. For example, five sacred South American Inca sites can be rated by visitors and ranked by beauty, value, and difficulty.

Maintenance and Tuning. Performance logging, tuning, migrating between a development and a production system.

Extensible Validation and Calculated Fields. This extension to the Web Services API allows writing custom Java code to enhance the software to perform custom data validation and calculating derived fields. For example, the provided Weighted Ranking class allows a visitor to vote for 3 candidates for 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place, and the combined weighted votes produce a winner's list.

Distributed Architecture.For extremely demanding voting volumes, ViewsFlash now runs in a distributed configuration, with multiple Satellite boxes tallying and responding to votes in parallel, and a single Master box combining the tallies from the satellites for display and storage.

Release 2.5 (January'00) incorporated the main enhancements:

Installation tips. Explicit instructions provided for most popular web servers, including Apache, Netscape, IIS, and the popular servlet runners, JRun and Servlet Exec.

Navigation. Pages now have a "trail crumb" across the top to help to navigate more easily through the application. On each page, you can go up one level by clicking on the appropriate link at the top of the page.

How to make Style Templates. This new documentation section gives tips for commonly requested template modifications.

User Authentication. In response to demand for intranet capabilities, we now support the ability to identify the person who is voting by: a) reading their User ID as provided by the browser and the Web server's Basic HTTP Authentication mechanism. b) reading their User ID as provided by IIS' NT Challenge/Response mechanism (NT Server only) c) extracting the User ID from a cookie, and d) extracting the User ID from a form field, including a hidden field.

Personalized, pre-filled Questionnaires. A new API allows a custom form to be presented to a visitor. For example, a content management system can create a URL that, when visited, makes ViewsFlash dislay a survey with data already filled in. You can use the new question type "Hidden" to thus identify a visitor with their unique customer id, for example, and capture this identity using the Authentication capability, thus tying ViewsFlash into your data collection capabilities very tightly. The Publish page shows how to use this.

Enhancements in questionnaire design. When creating a multiple-question survey, you'll appreciate the ability to move questions around by simply clicking on an up or down arrow, and the ability to insert a new question anywhere among the questions you have already entered. Both a header and footer are provided. HTML is encouraged, to embellish pages. A new question type, Just Text, allows to insert text and HTML anywhere in a questionnaire.

More powerful style templates. Create a polling place, and use the new templates Standard_, ResultsPage, or EmbeddedPoll and EmbeddedResults. When you do, the Poll Page and the response page will ask you questions about font type and size, and other appearance details. Each template you create can contain its own set of customizable options, thus making it very easy to standardize on a look, yet give a known degree of customization to each different styles template. A new option in the Styles page lets you create a new Style Template and copy the contents from an existing template, which can be very useful. Templates are now stored by default in a folder called viewsflash/styles. When you upgrade, these style templates are added automatically. The Custom 0-9 fields are no longer supported.

Application security. Optionally, you can require that all application pages be addressed by a different TCP port, which you can also configure in your firewalls to limit access to the application.

Problems resolved:

Build 686
When using View Data to retrieve saved data, some unusual character combinations could cause data to be missing from the browser even if it was stored properly on the server. Also, carriage returns in user-submitted forms confused the View Data display. When ViewsFlash was invoked using the HTTP API from WebLogic, an exception was thrown.

Build 660
When Previewing your changes, sometimes it was necessary to use the browser's Refresh command to see the result of your changes; this has been fixed. Also, when logging in to a password-protected bookmarked page in the application, and entering the wrong password, sometimes the application threw a confusing, but harmless, "unexpected error" message before letting you in.

Build 523
Corrected miscounted single checkbox fields in surveys where not all questions were answered. Corrected incorrect preview of response style templates. Corrected ocasional problems with passwords in places.

Build 522
Added additional capabilities for dealing with advanced polls created without the authoring tools. In places whose name begins with "ByHand", polls that are handcrafted can be included in them, after they have submitted at least one vote, and can be managed accordingly. This is useful for migrating polls from release 1.X.

Added documentation to Web Services API on how to force real-time display of poll results when desired.

Build 521
Corrected misbehavior of [/aavg] Style Template tag
Recognizes all file names ending in html as templates, such as shtml, not just .html.

Build 520
Corrects bug where archive poll listings contained current and sometimes even future polls.

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