This month's release brings a few small, yet mighty changes to Alloy. Here's a quick run-through of the highlights of this release. If you would like to see the full list of everything included in this release, take a look at https://releases.alloyapp.io

Character Limit Removed from Defects Description

The Description attribute which appears on all Defects designs previously had a character limit which was just too low for most uses. As part of this release, we have removed this limit, allowing you to use the attribute to store much more detail about defects.

Locations of Interest

Included in this release of Alloy Mobile, is a shortcut method for navigating to your workspace's locations of interest. The menu bar now includes a Locations of Interest (LOI) option, which will bring up your LOIs in a drawer list. Tapping the location pin of an LOI in the list will open the location in available mapping applications on your mobile, allowing you to navigate to the location.

We envisage this helping with things like needing to navigate to a tip if you're on a waste collection round and need to empty a vehicle, or to navigate back to a depot. The list can also be sorted and filtered, as an example, for times when you may need to find the closest LOI.

This feature is currently only available on the Android version of Alloy Mobile, we hope to bring this feature to iOS soon.

Full-Screen Job Work Item Editor - Mobile

Also included in this release of Alloy Mobile is a new experience when managing your Job Work Items. A new widget has been added to represent Job Work Items on Jobs, it gives you more of an overview of estimated and actual values and makes it much easier to quickly enter these figures whilst on a job.

This feature is currently only available on the iOS version of Alloy Mobile, we will be introducing it to the Android version soon.

Overview

A new setting can be added to workspaces to determine how long audit logs should be retained. Any logs older than the number of days specified will be deleted. This does not affect backups. This is to allow for greater control over the amount of storage space being used within workspaces.

Who will be affected?

This change will primarily affect users who interrogate the audit logs and system administrators.

Details

Audit logs are now automatically removed by the Alloy engine depending on a retention policy setting applied to workspaces. This policy defines the number of days audit logs should be retained for. If this setting is not present, audit logs are not removed. This setting is being made available to allow for greater control over the amount of storage space a workspace uses on the Alloy server. Where a retention policy is not configured, the audit logs will be held indefinitely.

Currently, this setting can only be set by the support team. Please contact the support team if you wish to enable this setting.

Expected Release Date

30th June 2022 as part of the Alloy v2.37 release

As an extra special treat, this month contains not one, but two Alloy updates! As such, we are really excited to announce the second Alloy update for May. Here are some of the highlights of this release.

Trigger Workflow from Items

We have had the ability to create manually triggered workflows for a few months now, this feature extends that feature by providing the option to trigger those workflows from an item.

This would allow you to create custom complex actions for particular designs and for people to carry them out easily through a single selection.

When setting up these Workflows, you may only want some users to be able to trigger them, you can control this by setting Read permissions for those users. Any user who does not have Read permissions will not be able to trigger it.

We've been looking forward to this feature and are really excited to see what creative uses for this everyone produces. For uses such as completing all jobs on an item, creating an invoice or emailing a supervisor, the possibilities are endless.

Workflow Emails - Multiple Recipients

Previously, whenever you wanted your Workflow to send emails to multiple email addresses, you would need to create a separate node for each recipient. This update will now allow for multiple recipients to be listed under the Email To field. 

Just keep in mind that each recipient address will need to be delimited using a comma (,). When a Workflow is triggered with this set up correctly, an identical email will be sent to each of the addresses listed.

AQS Builder Relative Dates

Workflows have been able to define relative Dates and Times for a long time, but this useful piece of functionality has, until now, been missing from the AQS builder.

You can now use a relative date time as a comparator to other compatible attributes or values. This is particularly useful when you are defining saved queries as you no longer need to update any date values that are filtering your data to a specific time period. For example, you can create a saved query to display all Jobs raised within the last two weeks. 

The point in time from which the relative date time is taken from can also be configured to the following options:

• Now
• Start of Today
• End of Today
• Last Monday
• Start of the Week
• Start of the Month

Custom Reports on Items

An improvement has been made to the Reports pane. Due to a slight difference in how Standard and Custom Reports are linked to items, the Reports pane used to only show Standard Reports. This has now been changed to include any Custom Reports that have been linked.

To ensure that reports are linked to the Item they report on, when creating an Item Data Source in the Report Builder, be sure to check the option to Link report to item?

Task Assignment Current Date

We have been hearing some great feedback recently about the Task Assignment view, we also have a lot of great suggestions on how to make it a bit more user friendly. One of those changes present in this update is a small marker highlighting the current date, hopefully making it a bit easier to orientate where you are on the planner. 

 Alloy Community

If you have ever wanted to connect with other Alloy users, we have recently set up a great place to do just that! Alloy Community is a place for users to discuss how they're using Alloy, ask for help, get support with issues and to discover more information about Alloy's uses. Anyone can sign up to post and it is routinely contributed to by a lot of the people involved in building Alloy.

If you haven't had a look yet, why not check it out?

Alloy Community

Overview

An option to export data as either a CSV or ESRI SHP file was introduced to the API in v2.32. This choice was added to the request model for the Data Export endpoint via a discriminator. When this was initially introduced, the discriminator was optional and if not supplied, would default to CSV. Since v2.35 the discriminator is now required when making calls to this endpoint.

Who does this affect?

This change affects API users of the Export endpoint. Web users are not affected.

Details

The following endpoint:

POST /api/export

now requires a value passed for discriminator which can currently take one of two options:

• ShapefileExportWebRequestModel requests made with this model will return files as SHP.
• CsvExportWebRequestModel requests made with this model will return data as a CSV. 

Not providing a value will now result in an error being returned.

Expected Release Date

This change was included as part of the v2.35 release of Alloy on 5th May 2022. We would like to apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.

Overview

As part of ongoing improvements to the Extended API, we are changing the way we consider required attributes on creation of activities through the API. This change is being made to ensure consistency with other endpoints as to how what 'Required' means when considering attribute values being supplied to the API by the caller.

Who will be affected?

Any users of the Extended API who rely on the geometry of created activities being inferred from the parent Asset will be affected by this change.

Details

Currently, it is possible to create an activity such as a Job or Defect via the Extended API and not provide geometry despite the activity Design having the geometry marked as required since the geometry may be inferred from the parent Asset. This has created an inconsistency where required attributes are not actually required.  

In order to remedy this inconsistency, we are making a change to ensure that values for all required attributes are always supplied by the caller of the API. For simplicity, the end result will be:

Required means required 😀

For activities where geometry and possibly other attribute values are not supplied but computed by a service/backend process, these attributes should be marked as optional. This ensures data consistency in the event that the backend process is unable to compute an attribute value for any reason.

Avoiding a Breaking Change

As part of this change, we will be updating all activity designs, including custom designs where possible to mark the geometry as optional to ensure that any integrations that rely on the previous interpretation are not affected by this change in behaviour.

Expected Release Date

This change will be rolled out over multiple releases starting from the end of May 2022.

We're excited to announce this month's Alloy update! This release will be applied during the evening of May 5th. In this post, we'll have a look at the highlights included in this release. For a full list of all changes included in this release, have a look at the Alloy Changelog.

You can also discuss this post in the Alloy Community here: Alloy Community

New Item Audit Navigation

We're excited to present the new navigation feature we have added to Item Audit logs. This enhancement will allow you to quickly flick through the audit history of an item and see the before and after for the change side by side. 

We hope this will be a welcome change but let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Pre-populate Attributes During Permit Application

A change made in this release will improve the usability of the Street Manager Apply for Works process. Information already captured on the Job will automatically be pre-populated in the Permit Application. 

This includes details such as USRN, Works Location, Workstream, Works Description, Start and End Dates & Times and Permit Conditions.

Creation of Manual Trigger Workflows

Timestamped Photos

Photos taken through Alloy Mobile can now have the local date and time stamp burnt into them. This is particularly useful for evidencing Defects or the completion of Jobs. This is optional and can be found in the settings menu.

Link Attribute Picker

A new 'Selected' tab has been added to Alloy Mobile. This tab allows you to quickly filter the list by items that have already been selected, instead of having to scroll through long lists of unselected items. This feature is available on both Android and iOS.

Settings UI Update

Another change made in Alloy Mobile in this release is an update to the UI used in the settings menu. With the addition of more items in this menu, we have categorised the available options to make finding the setting you require a bit easier.

Welcome to the first release update through our new in-app notifications widget! This month's release holds a bunch of great new features and updates. All these new features will be available in the evening of March 31st (GMT).

Discuss this post in the Alloy Community here: Alloy Community

Google Street View Stencil Control

A new stencil control has been added in this release. It takes a geometry attribute as a parameter and displays an image of the respective area taken from Google Street View. Clicking the image will open a new tab and take you to the Google Street View application and navigate to the area displayed.

Error Message Suggested Articles

It's always frustrating running into errors, we hope with this new feature, we can make it easier to find answers to what's causing the issue.

The error message window has been updated to provide you with links to suggested articles on the Alloy Community site.

By the way, have you had a look at Community yet? 

Alloy Community

The error message will search community for any articles that include the supplied error code, sharing solutions others have found or official guidance from the Alloy team on how to resolve your issue. 

If you still need the full details of the error message response, simply click the code button in the top right of the message to view the full error message or click the bottom button to copy everything to the clipboard.

All the Data Explorer Tabs

Are you the type of person who loves to have all the tabs you need open and to be able to quickly change and switch between them? If so, we've made the Data Explorer much easier for you. A small but significant change in this update is the addition of a couple of scroll buttons in the top right hand corner, allowing you to scroll along the tab bar.

Clone Custom Reports

Ever created a great report, then realise you need to create another one that is almost identical apart from one small change? This new feature makes that simple to achieve. Custom Reports can now be cloned, creating another report with the same configuration but with a different name. This avoids having to re-create the second report from scratch to match the first.

SHP File Export

We're adding a new option when exporting data from the Data Explorer, not only can you get your data in a .csv file, but now you'll be able to get your data as a .shp file too. When exporting data, you'll now be presented with an extra option in the modal to select SHP file type.

The export will create a .zip file to contain the multiple files that are associated with this data type.

What about everything else?

With our change to this new format of celebrating our releases, you may be asking: "What about all the other changes you've made?" If you'd like to get a full list of all our changes in this release, do head over to our changelog.

Alloy Changelog

Welcome to the all new notifications section in Alloy. Here you will find highlights to showcase new features and updates coming in each new release.  We hope that this will help you get to most out your Alloy system. 

You can still access all announcements including API updates by visiting our announcements site at https://announcements.alloyapp.io.

If you have any feedback on this change or any other, we would love to hear from you so get in touch at product@weareyotta.com.

Discuss this post in the Alloy Community here: https://community.alloyapp.io/c/announcements/

Overview

Following an internal review of the performance of the API, we are updating the API rate limits to separate limits per endpoint. 

Previously, a single API rate limit was defined as "sustained calls of over 100 requests per minute on any endpoint" and was controlled via direct disabling of the API key responsible. Following our recent announcement regarding API Rate Limit Responses, we will no longer disable API keys in this way. 

Who will be affected by this change?

This change will affect any users directly using the API. We've taken the precaution of monitoring usage across all customers over the last few months to understand if any will be affected by these changes. The handful of customers that are exceeding some of these limits have been approached directly so that they can resolve any issues before we roll out the changed limits. 

Details

We are moving from a single limit across all endpoints to separate limits by endpoint to better reflect the load placed on the system by each call. These limits have been set based on extensive performance tests and are designed to minimise the impact on API users. These changes will further improve the robustness of the system for all users. The limits are outlined in the table below and are with respect to a time period of 1 minute (60000ms):

POST

api/aqs/query

120

POST

api/aqs/join

120

POST

api/aqs/statistics

120

POST

api/bulk/generic

20

PUT 
POST 
DELETE

api/design

50

PUT
POST
DELETE

api/designInterface

50

*

api/file (See Note 1 below)

100

GET

api/item

300

GET

api/item-version

300

PUT
POST
DELETE

api/item

150

GET

api/item/*/graph

100

GET

api/item/*/parents

300

POST

api/item-log/item/*/reconstruct

100

GET

api/item-log/item/*

200

GET

api/item-log/design/*

200

GET

api/layer/*/*/*/*/network

2000

GET

api/layer/*/*/*/*/cluster

5000

GET

api/layer/*/*/*/*/basic

2000

*

api/route/*

50

GET

api/oauth-reply

100

POST

api/oauth-token-login

100

POST

api/sync

120

PUT
POST
DELETE

api/workflow

50

PUT
POST
DELETE

api/workflow/*/action

50

PUT
POST
DELETE

api/workflow-action-group

50

PUT
POST
DELETE

api/workflow-action-group/*/action

50

POST

api/(workflow|workflow-action-group)/*/action/parameters

10

*

api/(budget|change-component|defect|inspection|job|project|team|work-unit)

100

POST

api/extended/bulk

20

All other endpoints not specified above

1000