This month’s update provides a number of useful improvements across the board. The update took place during the evening of the 8th December. For a full list of changes in v2.42, please visit the Alloy Changelog.

Design/Interface Search Settings 🔍

When using the top-right Search panel to find items of a particular design or interface, there are several settings you can change to customise how searching works and how the results are displayed.

Before, these search settings were applied across all designs/interfaces. Now, they are saved per design/interface. This lets you be selective with your search customisation, so you can apply different optimisations to the designs/interfaces that are important to you.

For example, if you prefer to see Tasks sorted by their Created Time, this can now be set without affecting other designs/interfaces.

Additionally, these search settings now apply to item pickers as well, providing you with a consistent experience whenever Alloy presents you with a list of items for that design/interface.

For more details, please see this previous announcement and the Alloy User Guide.

Note: the search settings currently don't affect how Work Items or Bill Items are displayed in the Job Work Unit Editor. We're working to address this in an upcoming release.

Item Forms - New File Picker Control 📎

If you want to attach a file to an item, you no longer need to upload the file to Alloy first!

When creating/editing an item, it's now possible to upload a new file as you're configuring its Attachments attribute.

This is made possible by the availability of a new File picker control in item forms. When editing an item form for a particular design/interface, you can choose to add a File picker control for the Attachments attribute (or any Link attribute that references Files items).

When the item form is presented to a user (i.e. they create or edit an item of the relevant design/interface), selecting the File picker control will display a browsable folder structure where they can select one or more files stored within Alloy.

However, the user can also use the highlighted button to upload a new file and select it for inclusion.

Bulk Download Attachments 🖇️⬇️

When viewing an item's details, if you switch to the Attachments tab, you can now select Download all from the action bar to download all the attached files in a single zip file.

A simple but useful improvement!

Disable Module Workflows

Another simple improvement is the ability to disable any of the system workflows that appeared in your Alloy customer project after a particular module was enabled.

For example, you want to disable the Invoice Calculation workflow included with the Financial Accounts and Invoicing module because your organisation uses a custom-designed workflow instead.

When viewing the details of a workflow included with a module, you can now select Edit in the action bar and change Enabled to false, so it no longer appears in the list of runnable workflows.

Manual Workflow Output Mode

When creating a manual workflow, there's now an optional Output mode field that determines how items will be processed when the workflow is run.

The possible values are:

• Many items - all items are processed by a single workflow (used by default).
  
  
• One item - each item is processed separately by its own workflow. Slower but makes certain operations possible, e.g. if a workflow creates an invoice when supplied with an account’s Item ID, it will run once for each account, thereby generating an invoice for each one.

Alloy Mobile - iOS 16 Support 📱

In line with our policy to support the latest three versions of iOS, Alloy Mobile is now supported on iOS 16!

This means that we've performed a series of exhaustive tests on all aspects of the app running on iOS 16 and completed any work required to ensure stable operation. On this occasion, we only had to correct a couple of minor issues encountered when adding attachments to an item (such as a "Cancel" button appearing white on a white background).

As we take on iOS 16, we therefore say goodbye to iOS 13 👋. While Alloy Mobile can still be used on devices running iOS 13, the app will only be tested on iOS 14-16 from this point onwards. Therefore, if you were to encounter an issue on iOS 13, only basic troubleshooting support would be available.

Fortunately, all iOS 13 devices can be upgraded to iOS 15, therefore we strongly recommend doing so to receive the best experience going forward.