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.

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.

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

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

We are making a temporary change to the behaviour of how the results from an AQS Query Data Source are displayed in custom reports. This change will affect the display in controls when linking to multiple items to make this work consistently across all attribute types.

This change is being made to prevent report generation from failing under certain conditions described below.

Who will this affect?

This change will affect anyone using the AQS Query Data source with join attributes within the Report Builder to build custom reports.

Details

Previously, when an AQS Query resulted in multiple matched items for join attributes, this would be displayed as X Items into the resulting table cell in the report. However, since all entries in a table column must be of the same type, this would only work for String attributes (since the entry X Items is also a String) and would result in an error for other attribute types with the report failing to generate. 

From now on, resulting cells will show a single item attribute result, similar to the current behaviour of the single join result. If multiple values are matched, only the first attribute of the first item will be displayed. 

Example

Let's assume there is a project containing 4 job tasks. If the user would create a custom report using an AQS Query data source rooted on Projects and linking to Jobs via the Tasks Attribute (Project DS -> Tasks to Jobs DS -> Title). If a Table control was then added to the layout based on this data source, the display of the data in this table will change following this change. 

Before Change

Previously, the table would have shown 4 Items in the joined Tasks and Title column.

After Change

However, from now on this would display one of the job titles e.g. JOB-9.

Note

If you would like to continue using this aggregation, this can be achieved by using a Join Data source rather than an AQS Query Data source.

Expected Release Date

30th September 2021

Overview

In order to improve the accessibility of Alloy Meshes, we will be adding support for Open API JSON and endpoint documentation. Following a detailed review of the exposed endpoints and data models, we will also be acting to implement the following deprecations to provide better consistency between naming and conventions with the Alloy Core, Extended and Forge API's. Finally, we will be making changes to the way in which the security token is passed to the Meshes to improve security. 

Security token to be removed from query string

We will no longer be accepting the token parameter which represents an Alloy API token on the query string, this should be passed via the HTTP headers in all future requests using the same key of token.

Example CURL before:

curl -X 'POST' \
  'http://localhost:3000/aws-iot/update-device?itemId=abc?token=123' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \

Example CURL after:

curl -X 'POST' \
  'http://localhost:3000/aws-iot/update-device?itemId=abc' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'token: 123' \

MeshResponseWithItemWebModel renames property itemResponse to item

The following meshes are expected to return a response which includes an item payload under the property itemResponse.

• alloy-push-mayrise-notice-mesh
• json-push-alloy-mesh
• telensa-fault-push-alloy-mesh

This property is being renamed to item but we will continue to return itemResponse until the date specified below for Phase 2. 

Example response before:

{
  "itemResponse": {
    "itemId": "af32ef...",
    ...
  }
}

Example response after:

{
  "itemResponse": {
    "itemId": "af32ef...",
    ...
  },
  // we will duplicate the data in the recommended item property
  "item": {
    "itemId": "af32ef...",
    ...
  },
}

Risk calculation mesh to remove itemsResponse property

The risk calculation mesh alloy-push-risk-calculation-mesh is removing the itemsResponse property as it was not correctly indicating the success of the response model, it isn't required and will therefore be removed as part of Phase 1 changes. 

When do these changes take effect?

The above changes will be rolled out in June 2021, with deprecations finally removed in January 2022 with the following expected release dates: 

Expected Release Date

Phase 1: June 24th 2021

Phase 2: February 24th 2022