We are happy to announce InVision 2.0 Beta 1!
With InVision 2.0 Beta 1, we have moved the end user client away from Silverlight and over to HTML5, making it true cross platform. The InVision Designer and Server is primarily unchanged, except for a few changes required for building HTML5 applications instead of Silverlight applications, some additional new features and bug fixes.
Obviously, moving from Silverlight to HTML5 required a total rewrite of the end user client from the ground up. Because of this, some features from InVision 1.0 did not make it into Beta 1, but they will be there by the time we ship the final release.
This post will highlight the most important new features, changes and current issues in Beta 1.
Supported Browsers
- IE 11 (Support for IE 10 is coming)
- Microsoft Edge (if you’ve installed InVision locally, you must use localhost instead of your dns name when opening a Workbook…)
- Chrome 46.0 or higher
- Firefox 42.0 or higher
New Features
- Eaze – A new scripting language for writing spreadsheet formulas, cell behavior rules, form validation and configuring the Workbook Interaction.
- Themes and styles are declared globally using LESS / CSS, and then applied to the visual elements in the Solution.
- Live configuration reload of theme and Workbook Components during development
- CSS style sheets, Worksheet and Setting configurations reloads after they have been modified and saved from the InVision Designer
- Plugin support
- You can now write custom visual and non-visual plugins to the end user client using HTML, CSS and Javascript or Typescript. Plugins have full access to the InVision API and Workbook Interaction Model.
- Export and Import Scripts and View queries with automatic two-way directive resolution
Things that have changed since Version 1
The primary changes from InVision 1.0 to 2.0 Beta 1 have to do with styling, spreadsheet formulas, cell behavior expressions and setting up the Workbook Interaction Model.
All styles are now defined globally, so we have removed all the local and inline styling properties in exchange for the ability to specify the CSS class name(s) on elements that can be rendered in Workbooks. This makes it easier to manage all the styles used in your Solution, and it enables you to reuse style definitions across multiple components.
In Version 1.0, we had two internal script execution runtimes. One for spreadsheet formulas and cell behavior expressions, and one for the Workbook Interaction Model. With Version 2.0, we’ve moved all our component scripting to the new Eaze runtime, meaning you’ll use the same syntax and have access to the same core library functions everywhere. Compared to the v1 script runtimes, Eaze is faster and much more powerful, giving you a more powerful tool to work with. The Eaze syntax is slightly different than the old syntax, so if you’re migrating a Solution from version 1 to version 2, you’ll have to make some manual changes to your spreadsheet formulas and Workbook Interaction configuration.
Upgrading from InVision 1.0 to 2.0
With Beta 1, we do not provide an automatic upgrade option. If, however, you want to upgrade an InVision 1.0 database to 2.0, you’ll have copy the database and run a script to set up two new metadata tables. The script can be found in this document.
Note that you cannot run InVision 1.0 and 2.0 against the same database, so if you want to keep your current InVision 1.0 running, you need to make a copy of the database before you run the scripts and change the connection strings for the 2.0 instance to point to the new database.
Things we’re still working on
- No templates are available, meaning you cannot install business modules such as InVision Finance or the Loan Portfolio Manager
- Page navbar paging not yet supported
- Reports are not yet supported
- Spreadheet issues
- Auto sizing columns does not work when using stacked columns – recommends setting a fixed width
- Some cells in the summary row is displaced when there are no scrollbars
- Dropdown column editors are slow in IE and Edge. We will switch to a different editor type in Beta 2
- Context menu option “Reverse distribute relatively” is not yet implemented
- Context menu always opens below the clicked cell, so it will be clipped against the edge of the browser window if there is not enough space
- AMORLINC and AMORLINCMTH functions are not yet implemented
- No visible border between header and first row when row selectors are enabled in Chrome
- Filtering not supported
- Content of checkbox cells are not centered
- Workflow Control Object status selector does not show color indicator in IE
- Workflow State tree does not show color indicators
- Workflow tab does not properly resize after the window has been resized
Where can I get it?
Internal users can get it from <fileserver>InstallsD-SoftwareProfitbaseProfitbase InVision2.0Beta1
External users can request a copy (or demo) by contacting Profitbase.
Once it’s installed, how do I launch it?
If you accept the default settings in the installer, you can launch the InVision Desinger from <webstite>/InVisionDesigner/main and the end user client landing page from <website>/InVision
Note! You cannot use ‘localhost’ as hostname when running the InVision Designer, because that will prevent you from making web service calls to the end user client web service api.
Wrapping things up
Should you use Beta 1 in production? Probably not, but it’s your call. It’s pretty stable, but it’s a beta, and it most probably contains bugs that we do not know about yet. We will release new beta versions about every 2 weeks, but we cannot promise there will be no breaking changes between them, and in which order bugs will be fixed.
Additional resources