Greetings all! Things have been crazy over here Seattle and the mad scientists are cooking up some awesome stuff in the laboratory. There are absolutely tons of updates to Saxbi and Saxbi Server. Saxbi App has been bumped to version 1.2.0 and now includes the following notable changes:
- View List love. Lots of polish for the View List screen: views are sorted alphabetically, view labels don’t truncate prematurely, and you can now refresh all views without having to log out and in.
- Selector Configuration screen. The selector configuration screeen has seen an almost total revamp to now include the name of the selector on the side and the contents in the main area. This now provides a strong visual cue as to how many selectors there are and if they need to be configured. The previous layout only showed two selectors at a time and if there were more it could sort of “sneak” past you.
- Progress/Busy indicators. Every request to the server now causes a progress/busy dialog to show, indicating that it is waiting for a response from the server. Most screens will grey out the selected item so you can’t touch it again and put in another request to build. This should be enhanced in the next version so that builds can be performed completely in the background.
- Report view screen. Reports are now switched between using a dropdown list, rather than panning left or right. This improves in many ways son the previous method: you don’t have to scroll through each page to get to one somewhere in the book, you can see the title of the page in the page selection menu, and from a technical standpoint, this opens up some doors to optimize/cutdown on the amount of memory in use, if need be.
- Report zooming. Now zoom in and out of your report sheets by using the pinch gesture!
- Report view/general UI polish. Every screen in Saxbi has seen some love to make the UI most consistent and polished. For example, instead of grid reports just being a plain grid on a page, they show up on a virtual piece of paper that has a nice drop shadow and is placed on the report background. These subtle UI tweaks culminate in a much more fluid and enjoyable app experience.
- Landscape orientation. Landscape orientation is supported for absolutely every screen in Saxbi now, so you can turn your iPad any way you want on any screen!
And, perhaps more notable on the Saxbi Server side of the fence:
- Artifact Validation. One of the indispensable features when administering a Hyperion server is the ability to verify and validate some object, typically an outline, calc script, or load rule. It is incredibly useful to be able to have the system do a sanity check on your code or configuration in order to make sure things are looking good from both a syntactic, but possibly more importantly, a semantic point of view. Saxbi is now no different. The Saxbi REST API and server management tool now support artifact validations. An artifact validation will run a series of checks on the artifact and possibly other artifacts on the server in order to determine if there are any issues it can see. This is a great feature that should be incredibly useful.
- Custom Report Titles. You can now give a report any title you want and can use the choices from the selectors to fill in values for the title. Reports without the custom formatter will default to their existing behavior.
- Essbase subtitution variables. Use your own substitution variables to construct a report and make administration even easier!
- Install as Windows service. The Saxbi Server deployment can now be installed as a Windows service to make deployment even easier.
- Saxbi server tool updates. Tons of updates to the Saxbi adminstration tool for making it easier to connect, upload, and manage data.
As you can see, this is a complete boat load full of changes. The Saxbi app has been bumped to version 1.2.0 from 1.0.0, and Saxbi Server contains all of these changes in the bump from 1.0.4 to 1.0.5. Look for the Saxbi App to show up in the App store in the coming days!
Stay tuned for more updates, as there are tons of exciting things in the pipe!
