Designer release notes 2023

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

Note: Since the Q2 2023 release, Apteco desktop software requires a minimum of the .NET Framework 4.7.2 or later to be installed.

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

Designer Q4 2023 software release

New features and improvements

Allow environment variable in Salesforce Refresh Token configuration

This new feature allows the Salesforce Refresh Token to be specified by an environment variable.

This is useful where an external script generates the refresh token and wants to pass it to FS Designer.

Designer XML behaviour modification for source control

We’ve modified the behaviour of Designer XML files, so that source control can be used effectively.

This feature provides improvements that minimise changes to saved Designer XML, with:

  • Persistent GUIDs within designs (Data Sources, Fields and Arrays)

  • Optionally, not store the codes & descriptions for variables that do not need these stored (e.g. where Clear Every Time has been set)

  • Optionally, exclude the build statistics

Bug fixes

  • We’ve fixed an issue in the Enhanced build process, where if the Postcode mapping ‘Postcode to AA’ was used, then no codes would match and all values would be unclassified.

  • Fixed a bug where joining fields with mappings applied could result in a mis-join if the join keys between tables had mappings applied. This has been fixed and mappings are now supported on join keys for the Enhanced build process.

  • Fixed poor performance running the combine categories post-load action. The post load action ‘Combine Categories’ previously took a long time to run if a large number of codes were retrieved by the database query.

Designer Q3 2023 software release

New features and improvements

Upload chunk size

We've added a new option to control the upload chunk size for deployment in Designer.

The new option, with a default value set to 512 KB, appears in the Deployment post-load action in Designer. Increasing the chunk size may improve upload performance on high latency connections.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed an issue in Designer's Enhanced build mode where mapping on join keys was not supported.

  • Fixed an issue in Designer where duplicate folder references with the same Folder Description but differing only in case were incorrectly allowed.

Designer Q2 2023 software release

New features

Enhanced build process

We've created new designs that now use our enhanced build process on new builds by default.

Lookup tables are now set to be a MPL (Multi-Parent Lookup) by default, with the Join at Query Time option enabled.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed an issue preventing Sorted Codes property from persisting as expected when saving and loading a design.

  • Fixed an issue requiring an update to the Combine Categories Post-load Action, in order to handle cases where there are more summary codes than detail codes.

  • Fixed an issue requiring extract ‘DateTimeOffset’, data columns types, in order to translate data into local timezones during extract.

  • Fixed an issue preventing detection of build error conditions caused when variables in linked systems have the same description as variables in a core system.

  • Fixed an issue preventing the build log database from being updated, first occurring in Q4 2022 and now patched back to Q1 2023 and Q4 2022.

  • Fixed an issue preventing a design from being saved on a FIPS compliant machine.

Designer Q1 2023 Software Release

New features

OAuth protocol support in the credential manager

This new feature adds support of the OAuth 2.0 (open authorisation protocol) standard to Designer’s existing credential manager. It allows (but is not limited to) authentication to Snowflake [ADO.Net](http://ado.net/) Connector databases, which are themselves secured with Azure Active Directory (AD).

Users of data sources accessible via this protocol can now include them in their design. For example, it is now possible to authenticate to a Snowflake database that is itself secured through Azure AD.

See Credential Manager.

General

  • UK Postcode lookup data (Longitudes & Latitudes) updated to NSPL Nov 22 data set.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed an issue preventing FastStats Designer from inserting records into the Build Log Database.

  • Fixed an issue preventing ‘Find & Replace’ paths from working correctly for delimited data sources.

  • Fixed an issue causing multiple specification of an ERN in a query to fail for the SAP Hana provider.

  • Fixed an issue requiring the 'Skipping post-load action' warning message to be updated to an info message.

  • Fixed an issue causing long descriptions that contain non-ANSI characters to be incorrectly truncated.

  • Fixed an issue preventing the deletion of 'post-load' actions within groups.

  • Fixed an issue causing build crashes if a table name is a large amount of characters.