Metastorm BPM 9.1 SR3 (9.1.3)

Joe Smith

NEW AND UPDATED FEATURES

 

2.1 Web Client Enhancements

 

2.1.1 AJAX Compression
The majority of a BPM Web Client’s client-server communication is via AJAX. In a slow network or a Wide Area Network, enabling AJAX compression is likely to result in faster response times when opening forms that have Grids, and Drop-down, and List fields with large numbers of options. The BPM Web Client uses a component called RadCompression that can be configured for AJAX compression by making changes to the Web Client’s web.config file.
For details, refer to the Web Client Configuration Guide.

 

2.1.2 Grid Performance
The performance of the read-only grids has been improved when the grid columns have their width set as a percentage value rather than a fixed width value. On average, read-only grids are displayed 3 times faster when rendering a form.

 

2.1.3 Disable Field Access during Refill Requests
Default behavior related to refill requests is to allow for user editing of form fields during the request operation. However, this can result in unexpected form field behavior following completion of the server request. To address this issue,
ShowRefillProgress application setting has been added to the Web Client’s web.config file. This setting temporarily disables user access to form fields whilst refill request processing is being performed. For details, refer to the Web Client Configuration Guide.

 

2.1.4 Form Operations Timeout
To provide a recovery position when a response has not been received from the server in a timely fashion, FormOperationsTimeout application setting has been added to the Web Client’s web.config file. Following completion of the specified time out period, the request to the server is aborted. In the case of refill requests, enabling this setting also prevents the User Interface becoming unresponsive and leaving the forms in a disabled state. For details, refer to the Web Client Configuration Guide.

 

2.1.5 Encoding Password
A new entry can been added to the Web Client's web.config, Administrative Tools web.config, and Deployment’s deploymentService.exe.config that determines whether the component encodes the user's password before it is sent to the BPM Engine via the ECL. This can be of use to developers creating custom SAPs that are reliant on receiving the credentials in plain text. To use this feature, the setting must be added and enabled in all the components (Web Client’s web.config, Administrative Tools’ web.config, and Deployment’s deploymentService.exe.config) or none of them. Adding it to only one component will mean that it is possible to login to that particular component but not all of them. For details, refer to the Administration Guide and the Web Client Configuration Guide.

 

2.2 Deployment
The deploy.exe.config file now contains the application settings that are required for the deploy.exe application to operate. The file allows you configure the authentication and logging operations. These settings were earlier available in the deploy.config.xml and have been moved to the deploy.exe.config. This enables the deploy.config.xml file to serve only as an input and not a required file for the deploy.exe application to operate. If you are currently making use of the
or sections in the existing deploy.config.xml file when performing command line deployments, these sections should be moved to deploy.exe.config after upgrading to 9.1 SR3. For details, refer to the Administration Guide.

 

2.3 Transactional Support in Engine
Transactional support for Visual Scripts ensures that any database changes made using a Visual Script will be rolled back if the transaction does not complete. If a transaction fails, only the database operations in that transaction are rolled back. Any operations, which are not connected to the database, are executed regardless of whether the transaction fails or succeeds.

Ananda Jansen

When will this SP be released?

Brian Mellert

V9.1.3.0 has been out since April, but I've heard there are issues -- perhaps minor but was enough for us to not upgrade.

I hear that V9.1.3.1 should be out by the end of May, which if true is within the next week.

Jerome_Pearce

The issues were major enough for us to not be able to use it. Almost all editable grids fail.

Brian Mellert

Yea, I'm glad I healed off and saw the post here indicating the issues.  While we want the functionality, especially performance improvements since V9 still seems slower then V7 at times, I'm going to have to wait for a bit as releases come out.  Not sure how comfortable I'll be when hotfix 1 finally comes out ... I'll likely still wait several weeks.  (Thankfully, we don't have much on V9 live yet, but they are all in the works.)