New
The following is introduced to the Alfabet platform this release.
Dark themes cause less strain to the eyes and are favorable in low light environments. With dark themes, highlighting can be enhanced and light colors are more prominent on a dark background. The user interface can be rendered in dark mode showing light text on a dark background. A default dark scheme is available for users after migration to Alfabet 11.9. In addition, administrative users and solution designers can decide to base newly created color themes on dark mode.
Dark themes are only recommended for customers using a preconfigured Alfabet 11.9 solution. Only colors and icons defined in the standard Alfabet configuration will automatically be adapted to the dark theme. Customers who have customized the solution with configured reports will need to adapt all color definitions in the report configurations to work with both dark and light themes. Depending on the number of configured reports, this may require extensive configuration.
A description of the configuration requirements for dark themes is available in the documentation.
The Alfabet user interface has been enhanced to support keyboard navigation. This is an important step towards 508 compliance for the Alfabet 11.x user interface. Users need know only a small number of key combinations to perform the most common actions in the user interface:
- ALT + N: Move focus to left navigation pane
- ALT + M: Move focus to the masthead
- ALT + C: Move focus to the content area.
- TAB: Move focus forward to next item
- SHIFT + TAB: Move focus back to last item.
- Arrrow keys. Move focus to another item.
- ENTER: Execute action on the selected item.
Users can look up keyboard combinations in the documentation.
Calculated properties have been introduced as a new type of object class property to automatically calculate values for objects based on data already available in the Alfabet database. The calculated value is visualized as a read-only value and can be displayed in graphics, data workbenches, and content areas and provide the reliable display of up-to-date values without requiring users to click a button to trigger the calcuation.
Calculated properties cover a higher range of use cases than calculated indicators. They can be used to calculate values that are not related to evaluations and can return multiple data types like dates and references. Customers can create a calculated property based on a native SQL query that defines a database view to store the calculated values. The database view calculates the values on demand at runtime. To ensure good performance for runtime calculation, calculated properties shall be based on simple queries only. The availability of calculated properties is adaptable per class setting.
A description of how to define calculated properties and how to modify them in class settings is available in the documentation for Alfabet Expand.
Tooltips are displayed for values in drop-down fields in data workbenches, content areas, and editors. Users can hover over the symbol next to a value in the drop-down list and display a tooltip that provides information about the option for selection. The tooltips show existing hints that have been specified for protected and public enumeration items as well as descriptions specified in the Description field for objects like applications, ICT objects, etc.
Roles and indicators can be set in property groups in class-based content areas. The indicator type or role type can be assigned to the property group in the new Property Group field in the standard editors for definition of indicator types and for assignment of a role type to an object class.
Some property group captions have been changed in the preconfigured Alfabet solution to enable unambiguous selection of property groups.
The description of the field has been added to the documentation of role type configuration and indicator type configuration and the positioning of the fields in the property group is described in the Alfabet Expand documentation about property group assignment of object class properties.
Categorized visual items are introduced to define content items with placeholder text for the actual content. Categorized visual items hide the actual content behind a placeholder which can include a description, an image, information about the category the categorized visual item belongs to, and a tag with highlighted information. The category provides a mean to structure the content items according to use case. Users can see immediately which category the content item belongs to. Coloring can be used as an additional means to destinguish between categories.
Categorized visual items are defined independent of a specific content area and can be added to multiple content areas as content item.
Categorized visual items added to the content repository are by default added with the Categorized Visual Items item type. You can optionally define additional subtypes for this item type, which are then also selectable by the user to see only categorized visual items you assigned to the subtype.
The definition of categorized visual items has been added to the documetnation of Alfabet Expand.
Enumerations can be assigned to object class properties of the type Integer to display the integer values as text in the Alfabet user interface. For example, the user type for users is stored as an integer. While it was displayed as text in standard graphic views, it was displayed as integer in data workbenches generated for the object class PERSON.
A new enumeration type integer enumeration has been introduced. While enumeration items for string enumerations consist of a string value only, enumeration items for integer enumerations consist of both the integer the string represents and the string that shall be displayed for the integer. Users will see the string value on the user interface while the integer will be stored when the user selects the string value.
In data capture templates, either the integer value or the string value of the enumeration items can be returned.
The definition of integer enumerations has been added to the documentation of Alfabet Expand.
The following enhancements allow user administration in data workbenches:
- The button interactions to manage user authentication have been added to the meta-model as generic operation of the object class PERSON and will be available in any data workbench or content area of the object class. The buttons can be excluded from display in the class settings.
- Whether the user is a named user or an anonymous user will be displayed as string in any data workbench or content area generated for the object class PERSON.
The user type is stored as an integer and was displayed as integer in data workbenches for the object class PERSON . A new, private PersonType enumeration of the new integer enumeration type has been added to the Alfabet meta-model. The enumeration has been assigned to the TYPE object class property of the PERSON object class.
- Whether a user profile is read only or offers editing capabilites will be displayed as string in any data workbench or content area generated for the object class ALFA_USERPROFILE.
The user profile type is stored as an integer and was displayed as integer in data workbenches for the object class ALFA_USERPROFILE . A new, private UserProfileType enumeration of the new integer enumeration type has been added to the Alfabet meta-model. The enumeration has been assigned to the TYPE object class property of the ALFA_USERPROFILE object class.
The standard generic operations have been added to the standard Alfabet meta-model:
- A generic operation to create interface systems has been added to the object class InformationFlow. The selected information flow will be automatically assigned to the interface system. Predecessor and successor are prefilled in the editor with the components the information flow is targeting.
- Generic operations to define the relation of applications to business data and business processes to business objects via business data usage have been added to the object class BusinessDataUsage.
- New generic operations have been added to information flows to provide definition of information flows for components and peripherals. This is a resolution for ticket ASD-6167.
- The button interactions to manage user authentication have been added to the meta-model as generic operation of the object class PERSON and will be available in any data workbench or content area of the object class. The buttons can be excluded from display in the class settings.
- The basic functionality for editing, deleting, and creating objects has been moved from object profile buttons to generic operations fro the following object classes: BusinessData , BusinessDataAttribute , BusinessDataUsage , BusinessObject , BusinessObjectCategory , BusinessSupport , Contract , ContractDeliverable , ContractDeliverableUsage , ContractDependency , ContractGroup , ContractItem , ContractPayment , DataRetentionPolicy , ProjectDependency , ProjectGroup , ValueNode , ValueArc , ValueNodeArch , VMMeasure , VMMeasureType.
Solution designers with access to Alfabet Expand can define generic operations for editing, creating, and deleting objects, adding objects to a parent object and detaching objects from a parent object. This capability enhances the possibilities for solution designers to provide button interactions for custom object classes or custom object class properties.
The documentation of generic operation design has been added to the documentation of Alfabet Expand.
SCIM is a standard for cross-domain identity management and an important part of identification management in cloud environments. Alfabet 11.9 supports SCIM management with Okta® or AzureAD® as identity provider.
SCIM integration will push user data from the identity provider to the Alfabet database, updating the user information regularly. New users are added to the Alfabet database as anonymous users. The user profile assignment is updated based on identity provider group affiliation. A web-based SCIM management application is available for administration.
SCIM management has been added to the documentation for system administrators.
A new UseCase object class has been added to the standard meta-model in preparation of the new AI Portfolio Management feature that will be published as part of the preconfigured Alfabet IT Transformation server solution in the near future.