The second update for September contains some useful improvements to Alloy Mobile iOS. The update was applied during the evening of the 29th September. For a full list of changes in v2.40, please visit the Alloy Changelog.

Note: the same functionality is planned for Alloy Mobile Android users.

Item Forms on Mobile iOS

In the previous update, we introduced item forms for Alloy Web. This new feature makes it possible to customise the form that users fill in when creating or editing items of a particular design/interface. For more information, see Alloy September 2022 Update.

In this update, item forms are now supported on Alloy Mobile iOS.

If a custom item form exists for a design/interface, it will be displayed to users automatically when creating or editing a corresponding item. As a result, users will only see attributes that the item form has controls for, displayed in the order defined by the item form.

If multiple item forms exist for a design/interface, Alloy will choose the one most relevant to the user’s situation. For example, an item form tagged as Mobile will be prioritised over one tagged All platforms.

If no custom item forms exist for a design/interface, Alloy will display the standard view (all attributes in stencil or creation order).

Prevent Locked Items Being Edited on Mobile iOS

In Alloy Web, items can be locked to prevent them being edited. This can be done manually via the action bar or automatically via a workflow.

When locked items get synced to Alloy Mobile iOS, they will now display a visual indication of their locked status if you try to edit them.

It’s therefore no longer possible to edit a locked item’s attributes or add/remove any items associated with it, such as attachments, job work items, or related tasks.

Read-only View of Link Attributes on Mobile iOS

If an item has a Link attribute that references multiple items (e.g. a job with multiple job work items), the attribute’s field will show X selected when the item’s details are viewed in Alloy Mobile iOS.

Tapping the attribute will display the list of linked items.

Previously, it was only possible to do this if the attribute was writeable. Therefore, if your user account only had Read only permission to the attribute, or the attribute’s Read only property was enabled, you couldn't see the linked items.

This has now been resolved, so tapping a Link attribute will always display the items it links to.

We’ve got some exciting new features to showcase in this month’s Alloy update! The release will be applied during the evening of 1st September 2022. For a full list of changes, please visit the Alloy Changelog.

Item Forms

This is a big one! We’re pleased to announce that you can now customise the form that users fill in when creating/editing items.

Item forms can be created for any design/interface and provide a wealth of ways to customise data entry, which can improve save time and improve efficiency.

Using the new Item Form builder, you can add attribute controls to your form. Start with a blank canvas and add controls as required, or start with the default controls and remove as required.

Either way, Alloy warns you if the form is missing a control for a required attribute, and you can fix it with a single click.

Some things you can do with the Item Form builder are:

• specify the order of attributes
• show or hide an attribute
• make an optional attribute required
• override an attribute’s default value
• make an attribute read-only
• use AQS to sort and filter items in the lookup list of a link attribute

If this reminds you of stencils, there are indeed some similarities! However, a stencil customises how an item looks when viewing it, whereas an item form customises how data can be inputted into an item when creating/editing it.

Item forms aren't supported on Alloy Mobile just yet (users will see the default form instead) but this is coming soon.

Stay tuned for improvements and enhancements to item forms over the coming months!

Custom Interfaces

Another major new feature is the ability to edit interfaces and even create your own!

An interface is similar to a design but can be implemented by other designs/interfaces. This lets you define a group of generic attributes. Anything that implements the interface will inherit those attributes, as if they were their own.

For example, you could create a Playground Assets interface, which is implemented by more specific designs such as Swing and Slide. These will inherit the generic Playground Assets attributes alongside their own specific attributes.

Interfaces also provide a way to address multiple designs/interfaces at once. This is useful when working with things like:

• map layers
• AQS queries
• workflows
• reports

Targeting one interface instead of multiple designs saves you time and avoids repetition. Additionally, any future designs can be included by simply implementing the target interface, avoiding the need to go back and edit things.

We’re looking forward to seeing how everyone uses this powerful new feature!

Colour-coded Report Builder Controls

In the Report builder, controls now display a pill shape representing the control’s Label and Value fields. Pills are colour-coded depending on whether the field’s set value is dynamic (green), constant (blue), calculated (orange) or not set (white).

This gives you an indication of how your controls are configured at a glance. It also makes it a bit easier to set a control’s Label or Value, as you can now select the corresponding pill directly.

Bulk Trigger Manual Workflows

In May, we announced the ability to trigger a manual workflow for a single item. As of this release, you can now trigger a workflow on multiple items of the same type.

Select your items in Data explorer and perform a Bulk action as normal. Choose the new Trigger workflow option and select the desired workflow from the list.

Context

As you may be aware, we have been facing an issue with importing geometry data through the Gateway using the Alloy Web Client. Currently, when a coordinate system is selected, all rows with geometry in an import will return a warning and will not be imported correctly. This has been due to a change to a third-party service which supplies projection settings used by the Alloy Web Client.

This is an ongoing issue and has not yet been resolved, however, in an effort to allow a workaround for this issue, we have altered the coordinate system selection to display the conversion (proj4) string.

Workaround

To select your data file's coordinate system, click the magnifying glass icon to bring up the picker and select from the list.

This populates the Coordinate system text box with the configuration string for your selected coordinate system. This string is currently being formed incorrectly and removing the text +type=crs at the end of the string, will resolve this import issue.

We understand that this solution is not ideal, and are working on a long-term fix, but in the meantime, we have introduced this change to allow you to continue importing your data.

Overview

It's now possible for an item to display different Titles/Subtitles depending on which collection it belongs to. This is primarily intended to help you differentiate between template items and live items.

Who will be affected?

This change will affect:

• users who create designs
• users who create template items

Details

A template item usually contains a custom Title/Subtitle, often including variables that will be populated when a live item is created from that template. While this powerful customisation is useful, it can make distinguishing between templates and live items tricky!

Therefore, you can now specify multiple Title/Subtitle values in a design, and items will use the appropriate Title/Subtitle for the collection they're in.

This enables you to label your template items effectively, while ensuring live items created from those templates will use the intended Title/Subtitle. You could also do this for archived items.

To do this, use #if and #else conditions in your Mustache templates that reference specific collections. For example:

{{#if collection_live}}Live Item Title{{#else}}Some Other Title{{/if}}

You can also use #elif ("else if") to add more conditions. For example:

{{#if collection_template}}Template Title
{{#elif collection_archive}}Archived Title
{{#else}}{{attributes_streetLightingUnitsUnitNumber}}
{{/if}}

Expected Release Date

29th July 2022 as part of the Alloy v2.39 release

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

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/