The Board 2022 Summer Release Is Now Available

Kayne Schwarz · August 2022

The Board 2022 Summer Release is now available!. This update introduces various significant enhancements and new features for every type of Board user, from Developers to End Users.

Take a quick look at what's new in the videos below, and then access the detailed release notes, installer files, and more further down the post.

Board 2022 Summer Release Videos

Board 2022 Summer Release Webinar

New features available in this release include:

Smart Import Object
Power BI add-in
Cube visibility
Bring your own key (BYOK) encryption Beta
Additional enhancements

Smart Import Object

The new Smart Import Object allows users with at least a User license to load large amounts of data into Board in two ways: by copying/pasting values from a spreadsheet into the Object grid, or by uploading a .xlsx file. The new Object supports custom validation rules and suggested values, making it easy to load or update data in Cubes and even Entities without the need for Data readers: once a Capsule Developer has added and configured it in Design mode, the loading process is done from a Capsule Screen in Play mode.

Power BI add-in

The new Power BI add-in allows Board users to connect from Power BI Desktop to a Board Platform for immediate data consumption. The add-in enables access to Presentations via the new REST APIs launched in Board 2022 Spring release: after a simple configuration, you can authenticate within the add-in to extract data and create reports in Power BI Desktop using data coming from Board Presentations.

Cube visibility

The new Cube visibility feature has been developed to offer Developers unprecedented control over data stored in Cubes: with it, you can configure custom access levels for every Board user using highly detailed access and locking conditions based on other Cubes. Those custom access levels can be used to prevent certain users from viewing data or from performing data entry actions on specific Cube cells. Cube visibility rules are calculated at runtime and applied in real-time to Layouts and other Board resources in Play mode.

Bring your own key (BYOK) encryption Beta

With the new BYOK feature, developers are now able to manage data encryption directly from the Summary page of each Data model in a quick and easy way: from the new interface, you can enable or disable the encryption using a dedicated toggle. The BYOK feature gives you control over Board's enhanced security for data using your own private key. The new feature is only available to cloud customers.

Additional enhancements

New Object toolbar settings.
New mutual TLS (mTLS) authentication method for SAP data sources.
Refactoring of the execution of time functions and analytical functions in Dataflows.
RAM consumption optimization.
ApiQuery requests limits.

Full Release Notes

Visit the What's new in Board 2022 Summer release page of the Board Manual to learn more about all of the features, improvements, and bug fixes included in this release.

UPDATE (09/29/2022)

A new 12.4 Patch is now available for download!

Patch highlights:

Two new source settings for the new Smart Import Object have been implemented: “Fixed value” and “Formula”. Read more on the Smart Import Object documentation page
Several fixes and improvements related to the Dataflow, the Data view and the Waterfall chart

Bug fixes

The following is a list of reported bugs that have been fixed in this patch.

Broadcasting. A malfunction prevented scheduled broadcasting jobs from being executed if the user who created them was associated with multiple Platforms on the Subscription Hub. The issue has been fixed
Button. Visibility settings of a Button/Label depending on a selection made via a Selector on a Screen are now applied correctly
Charts. When various charts were added to different tabs of a tab Container, refreshing the Layout of a chart in one tab caused charts in other tabs to shrink. The issue has been fixed
Cube write-back. A specific scenario in which multiple concurrent write-backs on the same Cube slice caused the system to become unresponsive has been addressed
Data model. The Security Report page under the "Database security" section is available again in Platforms associated with a Subscription Hub
Data view. Exporting a Data view with the Number scaling option enabled to PDF now works as expected
Data view. Custom border formatting for cells was not displayed correctly in Data views with more than 100 rows after scrolling. The issue has been resolved
Dataflow. In some cases, Dataflows with period offset and a selection wrongly deleted values for members outside the active selection. The issue has been fixed
Dataflow. In some cases, Dataflows having the "Period by period recursion" option enabled and a period offset set on the source Block wrote wrong values if the first member considered for the recursive calculation was outside the active selection. The bug has been fixed
Dataflow. A Dataflow from a numeric Cube to a text Cube did not write the expected values if those Cubes had different dimensions. The issue has been fixed
Dataflow. In some specific cases, Rules in source Layouts of a Dataflow caused the Dataflow to fail. The bug has been fixed
Dynawrite. Copying text strings which contained line feed and carriage return characters and pasting them in a Dynawrite caused those very characters to be lost. The issue has been fixed
Procedures. Substitution formulas in "Show message" steps are now showing the correct members resulting from a manual selection
Screen visualization. The top menu in Play mode now works as expected, even on small screens/mobile devices with different browsers (in detail, a special optimization has been implemented for iPhones using the browser Safari)
Screen visualization. A visualization issue that caused some Entity members in the Select window to be hidden on an iPad has been resolved
Select. A malfunction that caused security selections set in Database security profiles to be ignored if multiple selections applied on a Screen resulted in no members has been resolved
Smart import. A malfunction caused the decimal separator of user-submitted values to be ignored if the regional settings of the machine where Board server was running was not set to English. The issue has been resolved
SVG map. In some cases, map popovers displayed when hovering over a map area contained values related to another map area. The issue has been fixed
Waterfall chart. With multiple Waterfall charts on the same Screen, data labels on top of series were not displayed as expected. The visualization issue has been resolved
Waterfall chart. A misconfiguration of the Autozoom feature of the Waterfall chart could cause the Screen to freeze when trying to open it. This issue has been addressed and a new background check prevents this scenario from occurring.

UPDATE (12/05/2022)

A new 12.4 Patch is now available for download: it includes various bug fixes and a new Excel Add-in option.

Patch highlights:

A new option has been added to the Excel Add-in to manage the cases when two or more Layouts overlap in an Excel sheet or workbook
Several fixes and improvements related to the Layout and the Select
Several fixes and improvements related to the Excel Add-in, Dataflow and Data entry

Bug fixes

The following is a list of reported bugs that have been fixed in this patch.

Color Alert on Tree Object. In a Layout having multiple related entities set By Row, the “Block” Color Alert setting was not applied correctly. The issue has been resolved
Dataflow. A Dataflow with the expression “a/a” did not write any value in the target Cube if a=0. The bug has been fixed
If a Dataflow was configured with a fixed value expression (i.e, a=3), had various Blocks in the Layout, and the target Cube had at least three dimensions, no values were written. The issue has been fixed
Data entry. When performing Data entry actions on an algorithm Block with no “Detail By” option and its formula referenced other Cubes with the “Detail By” option enabled, manually entered values were not displayed until they were saved in the Cube. The issue has been fixed
Data entry. Data entry on date Cubes in vertically aligned Layouts now opens the pop-up calendar as does in non-vertically aligned Layouts
Drill through. A Drill through table with many columns was automatically resized to fit the page and that, in some cases, caused said columns to be unreadable. The issue has been fixed, and now the column width adjusts to its content
Data view. In some cases, performing a Data entry in a Dataview with more than 50 columns and saving the changes through a Procedure that saves and refreshes the Screen, the Dataview would be visualized only up to the 50th column and the rest would disappear. The bug has been fixed
Dynawrite. The @screen substitution formula used in a hyperlink configured into a Dynawrite Object is now working as expected
Excel Add-in. If a SetSelection formula referenced a Layout cell containing a null value, refreshing the workbook caused the formula to result in an error. The bug has been fixed
Excel Add-in. In some cases, the connection to a Board Platform associated with the Subscription Hub failed with an initialization error. The issue has been resolved
If a Layout had 3 related Entities set by Row, and one of them had a missing child, the Layout failed. To solve this issue, a new behavior has been put in place:
- If the “Down totals” option is disabled, groups with no members will not be displayed in the Data view
- If the “Down totals” option is enabled, groups with no members will display only the Down total row with a zero value
A Data Block with the Average Aggregation function enabled and the Summary property set to “Average” caused the Layout to display unexpected values if the “Show All” option was disabled. The issue has been resolved
Layout. Data entry-enabled vertically aligned Layouts with the “suggested values” option set to display the description of members of an Entity did not generate the correct suggested values in the Data view pop-up list. This issue has been fixed
Layout. When a vertically aligned Layout has a Block with the “Detail By” option enabled and an Entity set By row, a specific error message is now displayed in the Layout editor
Adding Screens to existing Presentations after a migration, prevented users from opening the updated Presentations. The issue has been fixed
In case of an Entity with a reverse rule, performing a Data entry action on a member and unloading the Data model from memory caused the Layout execution to fail. The issue has been fixed
System Administration. Deleting a Role assigned to a user in the Subscription Hub caused an error when trying to access the “Database security” section of any Data model in the corresponding Platform. The issue has been resolved
Performing a Drill down on an Unbalanced Entity affected by a Screen selection, resulted in a Data view showing all items instead of those in the active selection. The bug has been fixed and a new behavior has been put in place:
- In case of a Drill down on a parent item, all items that contribute to its value are displayed, even if they are outside of the active selection
- In case of a Drill down on a child item, only the items in the active selection are displayed. When this happens, the total displayed in the Drill down window may be different from that displayed in the original Data view
A Screen selection involving Unbalanced Entities and regular Entities was not applied correctly and considered only the selection made on the Unbalanced Entities. The bug has been fixed
After manually sorting a Data view by clicking on a column header and manually selecting various contiguous rows, the result considered the order of rows before the sorting: in some cases, this caused an unexpected selection of rows. The issue has been fixed
Subscription Hub. SAML2 authentication flows can now be initiated by external identity providers following SAML2 standard specifications. To do so, the "idpInitiatedStandardFlow" parameter in the saml2.config configuration file must be set to "true". The configuration file can be found in the path [your-board-web-path]\App_Data\config\saml2.config
Waterfall chart. Deviation values are now always displayed between the two arrows of the deviation line plotted in the chart. If the deviation value doesn’t fit in the available space, the last numbers will be clipped and an ellipsis (“…”) will be displayed: hovering over the value will bring up a tooltip showing the number in full.

New feature

New “Remove overlapping layouts” option for the Board Excel Add-in

The Board Excel Add-in now includes a new option that manages all cases where two or more Layouts overlap on the same origin cell. This happens, for example, when the user applies the format of a table over another table using the Format Painter tool, or when the user copies and pastes an entire cell range to another cell range which already has values coming from another Layout definition.

In these cases, Layouts are “stacked” one on top of the other and, over time, this can lead to potential performance issues, unexpected results and extensive waiting times, as the Layout execution becomes very taxing on the connected Board Platform.

The new “Remove overlapping layouts” option allows the user to decide which Layout should be retained when the worksheet or workbook gets refreshed via the “Refresh Sheet” or the “Refresh Workbok” buttons respectively.

The option offers the following settings:

Keep last. This option removes all Layouts and keeps only the most recent one, based on its creation date. The removed Layouts are deleted upon refreshing and cannot be recovered
Keep first. This option removes all Layouts and keeps only the least recent one of all, based on its creation date. The removed Layouts are deleted upon refreshing and cannot be recovered
Disabled (default). In this case, all Layouts in the worksheet or workbook are kept and refreshed, even the overlapping ones

Please note that this setting applies only when two or more Layouts overlap in the Excel sheet or workbook.

Use the links below to access the patch files now.

Install Files

Installer Link		Description
B12.4.0_Setup_Server.zip		Installation program for Board server 64-bit edition.
B12.4.0_WebHTML5_Server.zip		Installation program for the new Board web HTML5 server.
B12.4.0_Setup_Office_64bit.zip		Installation program for Board Office Add-In [MS-Office 2016 and prior (64-bit edition)]
B12.4.0_Setup_Office.zip		Installation program for Board Office Add-In [MS-Office 2016 and prior (32-bit edition)]

Upgrade Instructions

Visit the Upgrade instructions page of the Board Manual to learn about the upgrade process.