Designer release notes 2022

Our Designer development team works using quarterly releases. Scroll down to see the Designer quarterly releases from 2022.

Note: Please see Notes for administrators for steps to be completed before applying a quarterly upgrade to your Apteco software.

Designer Q4 2022 software release

Designer Bug Fixes

Feature Description
Content Fixed an issue preventing the enhanced data builder from preserving leading spaces in variables.
Fixed an error occurring when viewing ADO.net providers, causing the provider .DLL blocked by the browser and prevent Designer from running.
Fixed an NullReferenceException error occurring, causing Snowflake ADO.Net provider V2 to fail with when Designer tries to connect.
Fixed an issue allowing invalid PeopleStage meta-data to be configured in Designer.

Designer Q3 2022 software release

New Features

Deployment via S3 Bucket

We now support deployment of FastStats systems via an S3 bucket. This can provide higher performance than deploying via the web service while also reducing the need for temporary disk space on the web service machine.

The FastStats system files are compressed in parallel, into multiple .zip files and uploaded to the S3 bucket. The FastStats Service polls the bucket, downloads, and extracts new files until all are ready to deploy.

Error if headers do not match option

We’ve added an option to Designer to cause an error if a delimited file header changes.

The Postcode lookup files we bundle with Designer have also been updated to the August 2022 data set.

Designer Bug Fixes

Feature Description
Content The Enhanced Data Builder has improved error reporting.
  Partial Indexes can now be used in more situations to improve query speed for multi-table queries, or for single-table queries that require ancestor counts.
  Virtual variables may not be refreshed by the Virtual Package in specific circumstances (if the last definition is a ‘URN Snapshot’ definition and the ‘Rebuild URN snapshots’ option is unchecked).

Designer Q2 2022 software release

New Features

Connection Error Severity

Added a new option ‘Connection Error Severity’ on the Virtual Package Post Load Action to improve error handling in the case that the FastStats Service is not available when the Virtual Package Action is run.

New Email Errors Option

Added email option to send on ‘FATAL’ errors only. This option is on the System Configuration, Build tab, 'Configure' button. What used to be a checkbox is now a drop-down combo box with the extra option.

Connections Strings Hidden

Connection strings are hidden in the UI unless they are being edited.

Designer bug fixes

Feature Description
Content Improve the error handling of virtual packages and deployment.
  Update Postcode .fspx file to include Feb 2022 Postcodes.
  A Single Parent Lookup (Merged) relationship gives incorrect join with Enhanced Data Builder if the Single Parent Lookup table contains duplicates.
  Custom Query fails to handle quoted values correctly.
  Enhanced Data Builder does not support international numeric format.
  Changing the build log tag in the pre-load actions doesn't change the tag.
  Orphan Indicator variable does not persist auto-generated reference.
  Enhanced Data Builder with delimited array variable can fail if no values.
  Can't open design with invalid data sources.

Designer Q1 2022 software release

Designer bug fixes

Feature Description
Load Actions Grouping post load actions causes a crash if actions are selected in nonsequential order.
  Enhanced build Array To Bits doesn't parse codes that are not a full multiple of the code size.
Data Crash with Dynamic Database Data Sources creating Flag Arrays > 32 elements.
  Enhanced Data Builder cannot handle DateTimes with HH:MM format (time portion is parsed as 00:00:00 instead of HH:MM:00).
  A couple of minor bugs with Dynamic Database Data Sources (missing variable name for URN, errors if dynamic source deleted but folder placeholder not removed).
  Copying a data source sets all variables in source and destination to default Selectors.
Expressions Virtual Package doesn't ignore comments in expressions.