ViewsFlash 4.05 Release Notes

 

Release 4.05 simplified deployment and optimized database use in portals. Problems with updating data and user id's that contained apostrophes were resolved.
To deploy quickly, start by reading Installation.

In Portals, the Survey Portlet can now display all surveys that a user is elegible for, and surveys can be marked as available to everyone in the portal or use invite lists to determine who is elegible.

Release 4.01 incorporates three new Styles, named Accessible_, Accessible_LikertHeader, and Accessible_LikertBody, for creating questionnaires that comply with WCAG Priority 2 and Section 508 accessibility guidelines, including XHTML 4.01 strict. For how to use these, see Accessibility.

Release 4.0 incorporates two valuable new features that support using ViewsFlash as a Forms Engine: a Script language for branching, calculating, and scoring, and the ability to enter data into a form and to allow the user to revise the entry later by simply returning to the same form URL. This features is perfect for keeping and updating user profiles, for example. Note that live tallies count only the first entry, but analytical tools such as Univariate and Cross tabulation analysis analyze the modified entries.

For portals, a new Survey portlet 1.1 allows a portal visitor to see a personalized list of the surveys that he is supposed to participate in, and to click on the survey to take it. To support this, Invitation Lists can now be constructed with or without an e-mail address, and the portlet uses the list of user id's to determine who is eligible to participate in a survey.

Many international Cogix clients run their applications in a default language other than English. To change the default language of ViewsFlash, see Localization. This release also adds i18n style tags which translate the Next, Submit, and other buttons and other language-specific survey elements when using multiple language surveys. Existing styles need to be modified only if you want to take advantage of the new [/lookupi18n] tags.

DB2 support has improved with more careful use of varchar fields and support for long text fields.

New Custom Actions include SQLSelect, SQLUpdate, and Script. The first two allow a survey or form to lookup data in a database table to pre-fill questions and to write data gathered in the form to a table. Script allows calculations. When using User Security, the right to use Custom Actions can be controlled by the Administrator now.

Question Styles now include Date, Number, Email, which are used to validate text fields. New styles are added to the database automatically when the ?Diagnose=1 command is done after upgrading. The older styles CheckNumericText and CheckValidEmail are superseded by Number and Email, but they will continue to work if you are using them.

New servlet parameters:
"datareviewapi" is now required to activate the data review and modification API.
"appcharset" defines the application's default character set. Useful when the native locale is not English. The default is "UTF-8".

New license keys:
Release 4.0 requires a new license key in a new format. Contact sales@cogix.com before upgrading for an updated license key.

Release 3.9 supports Question Library, Clipboard, Staging, Reviewing and Updating Saved Data, and other new functionality

The Upgrading instructions have been improved substantially. If upgrading from an earlier version, please read them now!

A host of new question management functions are provided. See Question Library and Clipboard for their description. A new option in the Questions page allows renaming one or many questions. A question's answers can now be uploaded from a CSV file. A new option in the place page, Append to Survey, allows a survey to be put together from other surveys.

A Staging capability allows for running the software in a staging server and interfacing to staging systems. It can also be used to transfer surveys from one server to another.

A new question style, Ranking, allows easy creation of "rank items in order of importance" matrices. Standard style templates have been fine-tuned for cleaner HTML; no functional changes are included, but please review Upgrading Styles. The Response style bars are now displayed using tables instead of images, giving better appearance and performance. The revised styles allow setting the maximum number of characters in a text field, and the number of decimal places to show in percentages in results pages.

Cookie authentication, when used without a cookie name, now looks for the User ID in a "ViewsFlash" cookie, and if one is not present, throws one with a random number for the user ID. This allows using the Save and Resume capability in large anonymous multiple page surveys; without this, some other form of authentication was required (session authentication could fail if the user left a survey open for more than a half hour). In places with rotating polls, a cookie that expires when the poll is closed is used.

New Security options allow protecting a survey with SSL Secure Socket Layer encryption (https://) and checking the "referer" header for specific content. The secure URL must be entered in the Administration page.

New options for showing archived poll listings allow showing archived polls in newest to oldest order, listing the poll opening date, and including the text of a poll question.

New Data Review and Modification APIs are available for system builders. These APIs allow reviewing survey data that has already been committed to its database and for editing that data are now available. These APIs do not support the Normalized data base format.

A new JSR168 compliant Survey Portlet is available as a separate download, for Portals which support this specification. A WebSphere Portal SDK spells out the required steps. Other SDKs are in preparation, but the JSR168 portlet should work with other portals. This portlet requires release 3.9 or later. Details at www.cogix.com.

Bugs fixed. In heavy traffic situations, Custom Actions that relied on ThisCall or setParameterValue failed because of concurrency problems, sometimes using the values from another request. Multiple problems when using Others and check box questions have been fixed. The storeflushtime servlet parameter now has a default value of 0. A database cursor leak has been removed.

Univariate and Cross tabulation analysis has been enhanced for multiple choice checkboxes. Percentages are now calculated against the total number of respondents who answer the question. For example, 62% can say they like sports and 75% like news. Previously, percentages were calculated relative to each other, so the numbers might have been 40% and 50% instead. Some bugs in tabulating and saving data entered in the Others section of a multiple choice question were fixed as well.

Release 3.8 is a major security enhancement release.

Application security now includes User Security, where users have Access Rights to places, styles and invite lists. For example, certain users may be able to create surveys in a place, while other users can analyze the data and yet other users can examine the raw data collected. The ViewsFlash Administrator is responsible for managing security throughout the application. The completely revised Application Security section describes all options available in detail. A new section on Extensible Authentication explains how to use custom authentication methods and custom user/role lookup methods, including an LDAP server and a properties file.

A new Where Used option in the Styles and Invite Lists pages allows Administrators to see where every style and invite list is used. When using User Security, additional options on these pages and the places page allow the Administrator to grant appropriate Access Rights to users and roles.

The Custom Action Validator class has a new method, substitutePipedParameters, which allows using Question Piping.

Invitation lists can now use an LDAP server as the source of people to invite to a survey. See also Using LDAP for configuration information.

Release 3.7.2 is a release for using surveys as ATG Dynamo Gears.

Unless you're very technical, skip down to Release 3.7 release notes.

This release incorporates new features for running ViewsFlash surveys and polls as ATG Dynamo Gears. These include additional Web Services API functions. cmd=getpollnames has a two new parameters, title=1, which is used to retrieve survey and poll titles, and smp=1 which retrieves an indication of whether the poll is a single or multiple page survey. cmd=ifvoted has a new parameter, verbose=1, which returns the appropriate error text from the Security page. Two new parameters can be used in a ViewsFlash query string, typically when including ViewsFlash output in JSP pages: outputtorequestattribute= is used in JSP pages to write output to an HttpServletRequest attribute instead of the PrintWriter; and nooutputstream=1 makes ViewsFlash use an already opened PrintWriter.. Another new servlet parameter, apiattribute, adds security when the ViewsFlash api is used from JSP pages. Finally, the onRequest method in RequestNotifier can now throw a ServletException if under duress.

Release 3.7 is a feature release.

This release focuses on using e-mail Invite Lists to Invite people to take a survey and to send them e-mail reminders that they haven't completed a survey yet. An invite list can be a comma-delimited file or a database query, and can be previewed in the browser or in Excel. An Invite can embed the survey itself right in the e-mail, or contain a link to the survey. When used with Authentication, survey progress is tracked and reminders can be sent selectively to those who haven't started a survey, to those who haven't finished yet, or to everyone. The invite list can be dynamically redefined during the course of a survey, allowing both inviting different groups of people at different times, or adding new people to the list even while the survey is open and e-mailing only new people on the list. By default, people not on the list cannot participate in the survey, but this can be overridden.

A new Authentication option, Form, complement the tracking capability. It displays a login form at the beginning of a survey, which are checked against the user ID and password in an Invite list.

A new page for diagnosing authentication problems better is included. If you are upgrading, review the Master poll and in the Security page, in part B of Authentication, enter in Display the following response page: viewsflash/unauthorized.html

Application server container managed security is now supported fully. A new servlet parameter, appsecurity=servlet, is used with new options in web.xml to provide two URI's for the viewsflash application. A public URI, servlet/viewsflash, is used for taking surveys and can be set up without authentication. An application URI, servlet/vfadmin, is protected using container managed security. See Application Security for how to set up this powerful option.

Other improvements include:

The ViewsFlash Administrator, using the Administration page, can now allow anyone to edit Styles and Invite Lists, which are normally only editable by the Administrator. Styles can now be entered by uploading a file as well as using cut and paste.

The two options for removing data and results in the Publish page have been combined into one, which now also allows sending Invites again to a list after a test period. A new option allows discarding partially completed multi-page surveys when the survey closes.

Simplified user interface. When using a database, options in the place Settings page that refer to writing HTML to disk are now removed, unless a new servlet parameter, writehtmltodisk=1, is used. Similarly, the seldom-used Webcast features are available only when the new servlet parameter webcast=1 is used. In the Security page, the Track duplicates in the database option is now used automatically when needed, so it has been removed from this page.

Database improvements. During servlet initialization, all ViewsFlash application database tables are created automatically and altered, if necessary, to bring them up to date automatically. However, there is one exception: when saving data in a Normalized table, the VWFDATA table index VWFDATAINDEX is no longer needed and should be removed manually. The application will work fine with or without it, but removing the index will mean less work for the database.

The menus on the Styles and places pages have been revised to make it easier to create, copy, and remove them. A new option in the Polling Places page allows very quick creation of single question polls.

If you are upgrading: see the notes above on Authentication and viewsflash/unauthorized.html, and start using that response page in all new surveys that use authentication. See also the note above about Database improvements and removing the VWFDATAINDEX from table VWFDATA. Review the new capabilities in Invite Lists and Invite. And don't forget, you can always call us for further explanation!

Release 3.6 is a maintenance release.

This release adds stronger database error recovery from dropped connections, an Others option in checkbox questions, an option to randomize the answers to a multiple choice question, and new Web Services API calls to retrieve all place names and to present multiple randomly sampled surveys. It also added support for MySQL and IBM DB2 UDB and on AS400 DB2 V5R1.

Release 3.5 is a feature release.

The focus of this release is increased complex survey functionality and administration, including dynamic question skipping and next page selection, question validation with JavaScript, copying and rearranging multiple questions, more powerful Custom Actions, data analysis with "Others", improved error reporting, more flexible support for databases, and new Style tags. Details:

Release 3.4 is a maintenance release.

Release 3.4 is a feature release.

Release 3.3 is a feature release.

Release 3.2 is a feature release.

Release 3.1.1 is a feature release.

Release 3.0 is a major architectural release.

 Peer Architecture. When used with a database, multiple ViewsFlash instances on multiple machines can store all data in the database, including configuration, poll and survey data, in an industry-standard peer architecture. Should one server fail, the remaining ones take its place seamlessly. Migration utilities for prerelease 3.0 data are provided. JDBC 2.0 connection pooling and caching is supported.

Release 3.0.1

Previous release notes.

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