New

A new Alfabet AI Assistant is available to help users quickly find answers to their questions about Alfabet. The AI assistant searches the Alfabet online help to answer questions that a user types into the AI assistant window. The Alfabet AI Assistant can be opened via a button in the user interface masthead.

The Alfabet AI Assistant is hosted on Amazon Web Services® and operates independently from the Alfabet installation. The AI assistant accesses the Alfabet online help as the only information source and does not process data from the customer database. The user's questions and answers are not saved and are only available during the user session. The Alfabet AI Assistant is available on request. An administrative user can activate and deactivate the AI assistant for specific user profiles in the user profile configuration.

For on-premise customers: The new XML object AIServicesConfig allows you to activate or deactivate the AI assistant for all users.

New object inspection views offer a streamlined, user-friendly preview that highlights key object details and enables instant, in-place editing. Object inspection views re-use the configuration of the new runtime editor capability to show a preview with all properties enabled for runtime editors. Users can single-click the button for an object in a data workbench, content area, guided data view, Gantt chart, portfolio report, diagram, and diagram-style reports to open the preview panel to view and edit the object. The preview is not available in business chart reports.

The preview is available if the new Enable Object Inspection attribute is activated in a class setting. It is possible to combine object inspection windows with the legacy concept of standard and custom editors.

Important: This feature introduces a new click interaction. The single-click interaction is explicitly implemented to open the preview. Consequently, navigation to an object now requires a double-click to open, replacing the previous single-click behavior. As an exception, clicking the navigate icon in data workbench rows still triggers navigation with a single click, bypassing the preview mode. If object inspection is not enabled, the single-click interaction will have no effect.

This release introduces runtime editors, a significant improvement that simplifies the configuration of editors, eliminating the need for hands-on configuration of each editor and its editor fields. Runtime editors are configured directly in the class model where the new Enable for Runtime Editor attribute can be set for each standard and custom object class property. The order of the properties can be specified to determine the sequence of their filter fields in the editor. At runtime, the editor will be generated with all relevant fields in the correct order. The Enable for Runtime Editor attribute can be deactivated on the level of class settings to customize the display of filter fields in different contexts. This is a substantial enhancement to editor configuration that obsoletes the need to separately configure editors and inline editing regarding editability, visibility, and captions.

Runtime editors are available in addition to traditional standard and custom editors. The implementation of runtime editors must be explicitly specified in the class settings where they are to be implemented. On-premise customers using customer-defined configurations are recommended to change to the new runtime editors. Customers using a preconfigured Alfabet solution will automatically have runtime editors implemented for a range of object classes.

External links as well as links that allow an email to be sent to a specified email address can be made available by a solution designer for specified user profiles. The solution designer can define and maintain the links in the Alfabet user interface. A solution designer can make the external links available in the user interface by creating a data workbench for the new object class ALFA_EXTERNAL_LINK ( External Link ). The links can then be added to a user profile menu configuration in Alfabet Expand. The links will be available to the relevant user profiles in the left navigation panel in the menu item that the solution designer has configured. External links can be added to AMM files as reference data.

Alfabet provides analytics dashboards that are based on the embedded third-party tool DevExpress® Dashboard. Analytics dashboards support end users to create ad-hoc information-rich data visualizations. Users can use the full-range of visualization possibilities available in the DevExpress Dashboard Designer. One or more dashboard items such as charts, scatter charts, grids, cards, gauges, pivots, range maps, tree-maps, etc. can be added to the analytics dashboard and filtering options such as combo-boxes, list boxes, and tree views can be leveraged.

Analytic dashboards can then be shared with other users as a dashboard page. The dashboard pages can be added to class-independent content area like Home and will show one analytic dashboard. Analytics dashboards can be added to the relevant content area via the new Add New Dashboard Page in the 3-dots menu and in Alfabet Expand via the content area configuration.

Existing analytics dashboards are available in the repository for customers migrating to Alfabet 11.10 from Alfabet 10.15. They must be manually added to the content repository to be shown in class independent content areas.

New logging mechanisms via the NLog® third-party component are available in Alfabet. Prior logging options available are obsolete and have been removed from the server alias. The new NLog mechanism provides the following advantages:

• NLog supports flexible setup of logging to various file formats like XML, CSV, or JSON, and various log targets, including logging to the standards console output, Splunk, and the previously supported log targets such as logging to file or the Microsoft Windows® Event Log. Rules are provided to define log target and log level for different functionalities individually. Log messages can be written to different targets in parallel and emails can be configured to be sent automatically in case of errors.
• The NLog component is well-suited for modern deployment environments, including cloud platforms, containerized applications, and Linux systems.
• Changes to NLog configuration are taken over immediately and do not require a restart of the Alfabet component. If an issue occurs, the log level can be changed with no interruption of Alfabet for end users.
• At startup, the log file includes not only log messages but also environment details such as the host operating system and processor count, facilitating support in case of issues.
• Log files can be compressed to ZIP files for archiving.