OL Connect Release Notes 1.7.1

Overview

This document provides an overview of the new features and enhancements in OL Connect 1.7.1.

Installing OL Connect 1.7.1
  • OL Connect is released as a 64 Bit version only.
  • Full details on installing and licensing OL Connect can be found in the online help in the installer.
  • Note that the software comes with a 30 day trial license by default.

Connect 1.7.1 General Enhancements and Fixes

Template Reports added to Connect

Generate a report in PDF format containing the most important information about your template. The report lists contexts, sections, master pages, scripts, graphic files, and any other resources used, along with their properties. This report can be added as part of your project documentation.

The report is created using Connect technology, and it generates an XML file and thumbnails, allowing you to create your own custom report structure and corporate styling. This can be achieved by altering the underlying Connect Template and DataMapper configuration.

See the following link for a sample report that was created for the OL Mobile Letter template: Template Report (SHARED-51378)

Document Properties

Document Properties can now be added to Templates. This allows you to specify properties such as the document author, the customer name and other important references. You can also add custom key/value pairs. The respective properties can be retrieved in scripting and are thus available as content in your documents. The information is also included in the Template Report feature. (SHARED-47780)

Stability improvements
  • Improvements made to the Clean-up service. In some production environments the database Clean-up could not keep pace with database growth, leading to the database gradually filling up. This has been fixed through an improved internal database structure and more efficient queries and deletions. (SHARED-46465/52345)
"Enhance with Connect" option added for PDF files in Windows Explorer

A Windows Explorer context menu entry "Enhance with Connect" has been added for PDF files. When a user selects this context menu entry, OL Connect Designer opens with a prefabricated template, that uses the selected PDF file as the background. (SHARED-15350/47156)

Support added for Remote HTML and JSON Snippets

In OL Connect 1.7.1 we introduce the concept of remote snippet resources. These snippet entries have a Name and URL property (e.g., the hyperlink to the endpoint) and reside in the Snippets folder located in the Resources panel.

In scripts these snippet entries are referenced just like regular snippets, e.g., loadhtml('snippets/my_content.rhtml') or loadjson('snippets/posts.rjson'). Note the “r” in the file extension.

Having the snippet entry in the Snippets folder within the Resources folder allows us the simplest overview of the resources used. In previous versions this behaviour would have had to be captured in script and therefore would not have been directly visible as part of the resources. This new approach greatly simplifies maintenance of the URL, as it can now simply be updated in the Resources panel rather than by browsing through all the scripts. (SHARED-42314/52591)

Installer improvements
  • The OL Connect 1.7.0 installation did not work on machines running Windows 10 build 1703 (i.e. the "Creators Update", released March 2017). This has been fixed for OL Connect 1.7.1. (SHARED-56800)
  •  The silent installation process has been enhanced, and now supports the following:
    • Setting the repository. This can be configured via the "product.repository" entry in "install.properties". (SHARED-17841)
    • Selecting a dedicated locale (language and country code) for the Connect applications. These can be configured by the "user.language" and "user.country" entries. (SHARED-18381)
    • Improved reporting of Silent Installation success or failure. (SHARED-17723)
  • Microsoft SQL server connection settings added to Connect Installer. (SHARED-36866)
  • The Update Client will now run the installation in the same language as the original installation. (SHARED-37868)
  • Installer has been made more robust, and will now continue (with warning messages, if applicable) when it encounters any of the following scenarios:
    • If Server start-up was unsuccessful during installation. (SHARED-39398/46837)
    • If no Database connection could be established. (SHARED-39400)
    • The Installer now checks if the OL Connect MySQL service is in the proper state and resident in the expected folder. If is not, instructional warning messages are now displayed. (SHARED-40309/45431)
    • If Connect folders that should have been deleted were found upon re-installation. (SHARED-41420)
Print Manager improvements
  • A document preview has been added to the Print Manager, for IPDS, PCL and PostScript documents. (SHARED-43959)

    NOTE: The Postscript viewer requires manual installation of the free Ghostscript application.

Connect 1.7.1 Designer Enhancements and Fixes

Edit and Save CSS, HTML, JavaScript and JSON files within the Designer

Ever needed to quickly edit an external CSS, HTML, JavaScript or JSON file? The OL Connect 1.7.1 Designer now allows you to open and save these file types via the File menu. (SHARED-42094)

Data Model Panel Enhancements

Various enhancements have been made to the Data Model panel. The browse options of the main record are now sticky and do not move out of view when working with a large number of data fields. An eye icon has been added to the toolbar, and is used to toggle the visibility of the ExtraData field. In addition, you can select and group multiple fields in order to collapse them out of view (and expand them back, obviously), which is particularly useful when dealing with large data models that force you to constantly scroll up and down to bring a specific field into view. (SHARED-45370/54106)

The Data Model panel has also been enhanced to allow alphabetical sorting of detail tables. (SHARED-47169)

Simpler Invocation of Email Script Wizards

Invoke email related script wizards simply by clicking the labels in the email information bar. (SHARED-47329)

Simplified Email fields User Interface

Create To, CC, BCC, From and Reply To email scripts by dragging and dropping a data field to the respective input field or type a static address directly in the input fields. (SHARED-9178)

Type the subject in the Subject email field and drag and drop data field(s) to positions in that string to make a personalized email subject without any scripting. (SHARED-51475)

Improved Customization of the Designer interface

Customize your interface by selecting your own colours for object edges, margins, guidelines, etc. (SHARED-49841)

Guideline behaviour improved

Along with visible/invisible settings, Guidelines can now be locked in place or set to snap to objects, using the new Guides option in the View menu. (SHARED-47159).

Warning now displayed when opening templates created in an older version

When OL Connect opens an older template file it is automatically migrated to the template structure of the current version. Saving the file in the new version would thus update the file format and prevent the document opening in an older version.

A warning is now shown when opening a Template created in an older OL Connect version, allowing you the chance to save the Template to a new file, leaving the original intact. (SHARED-51912)

Turn Warning dialogs Off/On

A "Do not show this warning again" check-box option has been added to many OL Connect Warning dialog boxes:

These Warnings can be switched on again at any time thereafter, via the "Reset All Warning Dialogs" button in the General Preferences dialog. (SHARED-16962)

Option to automatically Delete a dynamic table when the table is empty

An option has been added to allow you to automatically delete a dynamic table when the data table is empty. To do so, select the entire table, and then tick the "Hide when empty" checkbox in the Attributes panel. (SHARED-43537)

Replace elements with data-insert-location when inserting HTML elements

When inserting an element from an Insert dialog, Connect now checks the data-insert-placeholder attribute. The value of the attribute is then used to set the default value for the Insert Location option within the Insert dialog. If the attribute is not found, things behave as in previous versions.

This ticket also introduces the Replace option for the Insert Location drop down. When selected the to-be-inserted element(s) will replace the currently selected element(s). (SHARED-52369)

Scripting improvements
  • Context menu added to the Edit Script dialog. (SHARED-45381)
  • Find and Replace functionality has been added to Script editors. (SHARED-48424)
  • New menu option to rename Scripts or Folders has been added to the Context Menu within the Script panel. (SHARED-48607)
  • Support added for copy and paste of folders and scripts within the Scripts panel. (SHARED-49299)
  • The JavaScript parseInt() method now defaults to using base 10 arithmetic rather than base 8, as defined in the ECMASCRIPT specifications. (SHARED-49010)
General Designer improvements
  • Duplicate and Delete line(s) using shortcuts in the Stylesheet, JavaScript and HTML editors. Use Ctrl+D to duplicate and Ctrl+Shift+D to delete the currently selected lines. (SHARED-46928)
  • Entering geometry values without stating a specific unit type will now automatically assign the default unit type to the entry. (SHARED-50656)
  • When deleting an element (such as a Barcode or a Chart) on a page, a check will now be made for associated scripts. If any are found, the deletion step will provide an option to delete those scripts as well. (SHARED-45675)
  • An "All Files (*.*)" filter was added to Save/Save-as dialogs. (SHARED-28237)
  • Icons have been added for JS and CSS files in the Includes dialog to make it easier to distinguish between local and remote resources. (SHARED-47936)
  • Abs box grippers and borders now display at a consistent thickness regardless of zoom level. (SHARED-50175)
  • Support added for dynamically setting the media background image and its options via a Control Script. This only works for PDF files residing in the template at the moment. (SHARED-53524)

Connect 1.7.1 Output Enhancements and Fixes

Grouping With and Without Sorting

Sometimes the data used for generating documents is already pre-sorted, but you may still need to group documents into sets or segments. In those cases, the grouping process should not reorder the documents. This has now been implemented in OL Connect 1.7.1.

Consider the following example: data has been pre-sorted for postal sorting, which means that documents for the same customer will also be in consecutive order in the job (assuming a customer has a single postal address). If we want documents for the same customer to go into the same job, we can use grouping to create document sets and we might use the customer number for this grouping. When the customer number changes, we want a new document set to begin. If grouping by customer number also sorts by customer number, our pre-sorted order will get messed up.

The Job Creation settings have been improved to allow this kind of grouping. Sorting ascending, descending or not sorting at all can be set per field used for grouping. (SHARED-45125)

This means that, apart from straightforward cases where we are grouping with or without sorting, it is also possible to create combinations where some fields do alter the sort order and others have no effect.

Please note that grouping without sorting also means that any documents that have the same value for the same grouping field (i.e., customer number in the example above), but which are not consecutive in the input data, will not end up in the same group.

The settings for Grouping are available both in the Job Creation Settings dialog and the Advanced mode of the Print Wizard.

Progress of External Sort now displayed

When using an external sort, there was no feedback about how the external sort program was progressing. A new dialog control has now been added to Connect which displays the progress of the external sort in real time. (SHARED-53601)

Improvements made to Imposition Options dialog

The settings page for Cut and Stack Impositioning has been improved to show a sample of the chosen imposition settings.

Additionally, some settings on the Imposition Options page affect the way that booklets are created. These settings are now editable, so settings such as the gap between pages can now also be set for booklets. (SHARED-31097)

Additional Postal Services Barcodes added to Output Creation

Barcodes for postal services are excellent candidates for adding during the Output Creation steps, rather than during Content Creation.

Reasons for this include:

  • They often cannot be added during Content Creation because they depend on document size (or weight) and on a sort order that is determined during Job Creation.
  • They need to go in a fixed position, dependent upon the envelope window, rather than document design.
  • It can be desirable to have templates independent from the postal service doing the delivery, in cases where there is a choice between postal services. This makes it relatively easy to switch to whichever service is offering the better rates.

To support these scenarios better, a number of postal service specific barcodes have been added to Output Creation, in addition to Content Creation. (SHARED-54755/54962/55046)

The new barcodes include:

  • Australia Post 4 State
  • KIX Code (Dutch postal service - Post.NL)
  • Royal Mail (UK)
  • Royal Mail 2D (UK)
  • USPS IMB (US)
  • USPS IMPB (US)

Some of these barcodes have specific requirements in order for them to be usable. The respective postal services provide specifications and sometimes also the tools for generating the content of these barcodes.

The checksums needed for Australia Post 4 State and IMPB are calculated automatically.

Fixed issue with Merge Engine memory usage

The Merge Engine would slow down when running some jobs that used external JavaScript files. These memory issues have now been resolved. (SHARED-47242)

Job Output Mask improvements, to simplify working with output file names

We have improved the way that output file names can be specified. A new dialog box has been added to the Print Wizard, to simplify the creation of Job Output Masks. While it is still possible to directly type a file name with placeholders in the Output File Mask box, it is now also possible to use the dialog to pick the metadata fields and other variables that can be used to create dynamic file names. (SHARED-12173)

A typical use case for using place holders in an Output File Mask is while generating PDF’s for archiving purposes. This can require generating one PDF per document and often the files have to be named in a meaningful manner, by using an invoice number in the file name for instance. This requires one to define the invoice number as metadata in a Job Preset and then this metadata field can be used in the Output File Mask of the output preset. In addition, the Separation setting of the Output Preset has to be set to separate at the document level.

So the next time you need a dynamically generated output file name like inv-${document.metadata.InvNumber}.pdf or ${document.metadata.ID}-${system.time,'yyyy-MMM-dd'}.${template.ext}, you can use this dialog to help you get what you need.

For the Output Preset to know what metadata is available, you can select a Job Preset when creating or modifying an Output Preset:

In the Advanced mode of the Print Wizard this new dialog works a bit different, because the metadata can be directly edited in the same wizard instead of having to refer to a Job Preset.

Tray Mapping for Multiple Templates

For printing to a cutsheet printer, the Output Preset allows mapping of media defined in a template to trays and media known by the printer. To make it easier to use an Output Preset for multiple templates, the list of media shown on the Tray Mapping page is no longer fixed. So now it is possible to easily define a tray mapping for all media used on a certain printer. (SHARED-49357)

This doesn’t mean that all these media have to be used in every job, so one might even map multiple media types to the same tray. In such cases, a Job Preset could be used to filter jobs in such a way that no conflicting tray mappings can occur within a job, as Job Presets allow filtering by media type.

Print Output
  • Improvements made to the Print Wizard
    These include:
    • Improved usability in Inserter dialog. (SHARED-38279)
    • Data Filtering dialog usability improved. (SHARED-38281/38283)
    • Support added for manually setting both the horizontal and vertical gutter settings in Booklets (SHARED-53769)
    • The Additional Text and Barcode dialogs did not allow many of the available system fonts to be used. This issue has been fixed. (SHARED-46825)
  • Improved PDF comparison implementation has improved output creation times. (SHARED-44097)
  • PostScript Tray mapping configurations can now be made independent of the loaded template. (SHARED-49357)
  • IPDS and AFPDS improvements:
    • Improved colour support. (SHARED-49554)
    • Extra image compression options added. (SHARED-51222)
  • Improve output creation speed when outputting with separation. (SHARED-52088)

  • Soft masked images were not handled correctly when writing to PDF/VT, causing errors. This issue has now been fixed. (SHARED-32335)

Known Issues

Installation Paths with Multi-Byte Characters

When installing the Traditional Chinese or Japanese versions of Connect, if the user specifies an alternative installation path containing multi-byte/wide-char characters it can break some of the links to the Connect-related shortcuts in the Start Menu and cause an error to appear at the end of the installer. The workaround for the moment is to use the default installation path. The problem will be addressed in a later release.

Switching Languages

Changing the language using the Window>Preferences>Language Setting menu option does not currently change all of the strings in the application to the selected language. This is a known issue and will be fixed in a later release.

In the meantime we offer the following workaround for anyone who needs to change the language:

  1. Go to the .ini files for the Designer and Server Config:
    • C:\Program Files\Objectif Lune\OL Connect\Connect Designer\Designer.ini
    • C:\Program Files\Objectif Lune\OL Connect\Connect Server Configuration\ServerConfig.ini
  2. Change the language parameter to the required one under Duser.language=en | es | de | fr | it | ja | pt | tw | zh

Only one of the above language tags should be selected. Once saved, Connect will appear in the selected language at next start-up.

GoDaddy Certificates

When installing Connect offline, dialogs allow installing the GoDaddy certificates. Most users should use the default settings and click Next. In some cases, however, this may not work correctly. For this reason those users should activate Place all certificates in the following store and then select the Trusted Root Certification Authorities as the target certificate store.

Available Printer Models

Note that only the single Printer Model (Generic PDF) will appear on the Advanced page of the Print Wizard by default.

To add additional printer models click on the settings button next to the Model selection entry box.

Colour Model in Stylesheets

The colour model of colours defined in a stylesheet can sometimes change after editing the stylesheet. This is a known issue and will be addressed in a subsequent release.

Online Help Links Point to Introductory Page

Context sensitivity for the online help is not yet enabled in Connect. All links and F1 calls point to the introductory page, where you can Search on keywords to bring up Help pages relating to the topic.

Context sensitivity will be introduced in a subsequent release of Connect.

Image Preview in Designer

If in the Windows Internet settings (Connection Settings > LAN configuration) a proxy is enabled, but "Bypass proxy settings for local addresses" is not checked, the image preview service, conversion service and live preview tab in the Designer will not work and exhibit the following issues:

  • Images will be shown as 0 size boxes (no red 'X' is displayed)
  • Live preview does not progress, and when re-activated reports "browsers is busy"

To fix the issue you must check the "Bypass proxy settings for local addresses" option.

VIPP Output

Some templates set up with landscape orientation are being produced as portrait in VIPP. It can also sometimes be the case that text and images can be slightly displaced. These are known issues and will be addressed in a later release of Connect.