Improvements

The notification pane has been updated with a refreshed look and feel, enhancing the design and overall user experience through redesigned tabs within the notification pane. A new Mentions tab makes it easy to stay on top of conversations by highlighting notifications whenever users are invited via @mentions through the User Comments option in the three-dots menu. Additionally, tabs for Data Capture, ADIF, and Job Schedule notifications are now displayed only for users logged in with an administrative profile, ensuring a more relevant and tailored experience.

The visualization and behavior of the notification bell have also been improved to provide clearer, more intuitive feedback. Users are alerted to new notifications directly in the masthead, with a new blue indicator dot appearing on the notification bell when unread items are available. Once a notification is marked as read or the user navigates to the related object (for example, via an @mention), the blue indicator dot automatically disappears, keeping the experience clean and up-to-date.

The Notification Center, where users can access the full notification history, has also been aligned for a more consistent user experience.

Content areas that display information about an object can now be configured to also include data about related objects. This enhancement allows, for example, data from the base object of a workflow step to be shown directly in a separate content page in the workflow step’s content area. Users can edit the base object through inline editing, eliminating the need to switch between different content areas and improving efficiency.

Solution designers with access to Alfabet Expand can change the base object for fetching the information on the level of the content page or individual content items. The new base object is defined via a query that finds a single object in the Alfabet database.

Field alignment within attribute groups has been reworked to improve clarity and consistency. All fields are now left-aligned, ensuring that values are displayed in clean, consistent columns within the attribute group, rather than appearing differently distributed across rows.

In addition, diagram items that display multiple indicator icons now include padding between the icons. This improves the visual appearance of the diagram and makes the displayed information easier to read and interpret.

For exporting data to Microsoft Excel®, new formats XSL (No Icons) and XSLX (No Icons) are now available. These options allow users to export data without indicator icons and without a legend, providing a cleaner and simplified output. This feature is a resolution for ticket ASD-7841.

The AI assistant for answering questions about Alfabet based on the existing documentation has been enhanced to understand and respond in the language currently used in the user interface.

Calculated properties can be added to object inspection windows, runtime editors, and custom editors in the same way as object class properties. These properties are intended for informational purposes and are always displayed as read-only, static values.

If a user updates an underlying value that affects the calculation, the calculated property will not automatically refresh within the current view. Additionally, there is a limitation for calculated object class properties that return references or arrays of references and these values will not be displayed in runtime editors. This improvement is a resolution for ticket ASD-10210.

A new standard generic operation has been added to the ICT object class. When an existing ICT object is selected, this operation enables the creation of a new ICT object based on the selected one, streamlining reuse and ensuring consistency. This improvement is a resolution for ticket ASD-9908.

Solution designers with access to Alfabet Expand can configure content items that display indicator cards, evaluation cards, or object class property groups containing calculated indicators to automatically recalculate indicators without requiring user interaction.

To enable this functionality, the new Recalculate Indicators on Load attribute must be set to True. This ensures that indicators are recalculated when the base object changes or when the content area or guided data view is reloaded. Note that this setting only triggers the recalculation itself. To display the updated values, the Load on Update property of the content item must also be set to True. Recalculation is always performed before the content item is refreshed.

The Alfabet parameter @BASE can be used in lookahead queries defined for custom selectors. With this change, lookahead queries can refer to the base object of the current view to filter out options which a user shall not select based on the relation of the selector objects with the current base object. This improvement is a resolution for ticket ASD-9846.

The dedicated integration with Amazon Web Services® is no longer supported. All features can be implemented with the generic OAS-based interface with third-party RESTful services. This approach provides greater flexibility and can be easily adapted to changes in external APIs without requiring product-specific updates or waiting for reimplementation of dedicated connectors.

As a result, the XML object AmazonWebServicesConfig is obsolete and has been removed from the XML Objects folder in Alfabet Expand.

The idocupload endpoint of the Alfabet RESTful services has been enhanced to simplify file uploads. The JSON specification for the upload can now be provided directly in a request header named IDOC-Info.

For backward compatibility, it remains possible to send the JSON specification as a separate file alongside the file being uploaded, as supported in previous releases.

The logging implementation using NLog has been enhanced to support logging during the startup phase of Alfabet components. This improvement ensures that initialization processes are fully traceable, enabling better diagnostics and troubleshooting from the very beginning of execution. As a result, updates to the NLog configuration files are required. The configuration examples provided with the release have been revised accordingly to reflect the new setup.

High availability for service execution has been improved by introducing failover connection management for the Alfabet Server. It is no longer necessary to rely on a single Alfabet Server instance to handle tasks such as email delivery or event execution for a given database.

Multiple Alfabet Server instances (running as services or applications) can now connect to the same database. However, only the first connected Alfabet Server instance remains active and executes services, while all others stay in standby mode. If the active Alfabet Server becomes unavailable or is shut down, one of the standby instances automatically takes over. This ensures uninterrupted and reliable execution of services and events.

Databases can now be archived via a command line tool to a file while optionally anonymizing sensitive data, without affecting the original source database. A new command-line parameter has been added to the database archive command of AlfaAdministratorConsole.exe, enabling the creation of archive files in ADBZ format. When the parameter -AnonymizeData true is specified, the data in the generated ADBZ file is anonymized. By default, this setting is set to false, meaning data is archived in its original form unless anonymization is explicitly requested.

The Alfabet online help start page has been redesigned to improve usability and reduce the need for scrolling. A new left-hand table of contents panel enables quicker navigation to relevant information. Users can click a link to view related topics in a tile layout for easier browsing. The layout is fully responsive, ensuring optimal readability on tablets and mobile devices. The start page is also Section 508 compliant and supports full keyboard navigation.