board 10.3 - General Model Migration - Screen WHITEOUT Patches

Remember in the film 'Ghostbusters', there was a golden rule - Don't cross the streams? OK, i know, you're all too young to remember that film. So, no developer would expect to migrate to an upgraded platform and not find disparities and issues with their models as a result of improved functionality and added vital features. In the little time I've had to provisionally test BOARD 10.3.0 WEB on my own production models, I've picked up on one general issue that I hope will help other developers when planning their upgrade strategies and plans, which is:

OVERLAPPING OBJECTS ARE NOT ALLOWED

I've tested several of my production models and they all need some major screen layout re-working to function correctly due to labels overlapping objects or objects touching objects. In these occurrences, big blank white patches appear on the screen. Curiously, the size and shape of these voids do not relate to that of the objects causing the 'whiteout' patches; maybe the issue is caused by the preparation for mobile layout preferences and also due to the update to the functionality and/or upgraded behaviour of the SLIDING TOOLBAR in the top left of all objects?

I've tried to illustrate the issue with the following images - the data is 'fuzzy' as it has been deliberately pixellated:

Image 1: BOARD 10.1.4 WEB page as it originally was (I know there's an issue with 'Northern Ireland' and 'Offshore' Valuation Counts and the TOTAL of the bottom left Dataview too!).

Image 2: BOARD 10.1.4 mid-Data refresh - Looking closely, it can be seen that there are objects which overlap the pie chart array (middle left of the image)

Image 3: BOARD 10.3.0 outcome with a white patch where the Pie Charts should be. Also, the dataview bottom left has been affected as well as the Annual Rent Dataview, and last pie chart.

I can appreciate that BOARD Intl are transitioning us to BOARD 11 in steps with the strategy of releasing 10.3, 10.5 and finally 11.0 so that we can get used to the new features in a reasonable timeframe, prepare our teams for the changes and create solutions to development issues. To go from 10.1.4 to 11 and have to mitigate the design changes in one upgrade would be very hard.

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Sebastian Gurt

Hi Paul Wyatt - Avison Young UK,

I think this is the auto-information-design-optimizer which tries to remove all pie and doughnut charts from reports :-)

No - just joking. ;-)

I know about some of our projects which use a lot of overlapping objects (and are already on 10.3.0). Maybe you just need to adjust the levels of the objects (send to background / foreground) a little bit? In general 10.3.0 should bring the web client again a little closer to the win client. For example the row height of DV's now matches the win client.

Sebastian

Paul Wyatt

Hey Sebastian,

LOL, Please please don't judge me on the use of pies and doughnuts - "It was the clients, they made me do it, honest!". I've spent half a lifetime trying to irradiate such objects and use best practice data visualisation methods.

Next up - I totally appreciate that I have not diagnosed the issues creating the 'whiteouts' and there are some pretty inconsistent reasons for why they occur in 10.3 but and I only had a bit of time over the weekend to carry out some compatibility testing before I had to return the server to 10.1.4. However, I did identify that a very general rule was to not overlap where possible, hence the post. I will be analysing all the upgrade issues I come across more thoroughly in the coming weeks, as I prepare our upgrade strategy and development plans.

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Paul Wyatt - Avison Young UK

Be careful, the numbers within Image 2 are NOT pixelized.

Etienne CAUSSE

Hi Paul,

Your message worries me a bit regarding some screens where the overlap is made on purpose with objects that can appear or not depending on their layout (i.e. labels).

Did you try that ?