FF! 8.0 Development Notes

As I was just about to post this, I realized how many things had changed since Build 343. If it's been a while, so grab the full download if you can. Another note: we'll be pretty heads down until DevCon when we'll have the RC ready for full consumption. If you're heading to Vegas, hope to see you there.

Designer Updates
1. We changed the Single click to be a double-click. When you double-click an area, it will then move the active tab to the related section. Try double-clicking where it says Filters and you'll see what I mean.

2. The Filter Tab now says Filter Requests and the filter line item has been cleaned up a fair bit.
    - The OR and parentheses are no longer enabled if there are no items in the list
    - double-clicking on an empty list will do an implicit add.

3. The screen resizes itself differently now in certain areas and the workbench pin stays pinned as it needs to.

4. A lot of the screens have been re-designed: Group Calculations dialog, Output dialog, Expression dialog, Edit Data Item, Change Appearance, email bursting. No need for real detail here.

5. The Edit Expression dialog is NOT complete yet although the user interface is.

6. Labels have changed to be more consistent.

7. The Default to show comments is now on the Header (instead of the footer)

8. When a style uses a different font, this font is now reflected in the Preview area.

9. User is now unable to reset Page # unless New Page is set in the Group formatting page

10. Show Column on report now added to Change Appearance dialog so that users can set the Show/Hide property from that dialog as well.

11. Ensured that when you hit Group/Ungroup, the related data item is also hidden or shown.

12. Users can now remove all sort orders by multi-selecting them and choose Remove.

13. Ensure that right-clicking on data item and grouping does not Add an already existing sort.

Scenario:
If you were already sorting on Car Make and then someone right clicked on the Car Make data item and chose Group, it should not add another sort by Car Make it should simply group the existing one.

14. Ensured multi-select works for Hide/Show on data items screen

15. You can now re-order data items by dragging and dropping column headers

16. Fixed Right-click Group to group by the right item.

17. Enhanced features for graphing, including the ability to customize Labels, legends and plots for Excel graphs.

18. Revisions to Batch screen cleaning up some obvious errors.

One thing:

Because of a bug in VFP, you can't right-click and choose Select All when you have multiple items selected. This unfortunately is a bug in VFP that we are waiting for a fix on.



Request Manager
1. The Right click menu on the Request has been re-arranged to make more sense.

2. The Export option now has a slightly different dialog. It is STILL MISSING options to only export certain pieces of details (like Data Items, Joins and FRX Layouts)

3. The Request Manager no longer bombs when two requests with same name are in Request file. It will ignore the second one.


Changes in the Sample Data
The Filter for Car Colors is no longer case sensitive.

Setup Wizard and Upgrader
Better support for DB2 and other databases.
The Upgrader automatically converts Foxfire! 3.0 and older FRX files to a more current format.


New Properties in oRequest object:

DataSourceCount - returns the number of unique aliases used in the request

aDataSources - an array of the aliases used

This is used to disable the Related Data button in the filter screen but can also be used for future un-defined purposes