Release Notes, 4.4.0.0

Arcadia Enterprise Release 4.4.0.0

(ArcViz 4.4.0.0, ArcEngine 2.9.3)

This document contains release information notes for Arcadia Enterprise Release 4.4.0.0, and is accurate at the time of publication.

To see the notes for other releases, see Recent Release Notes.

In this release, we have these enhancements:

To see our certification matrix, read Certifications.

To see the catalog of known issues, read Known Issues.

Upgrade to this Release

Arcadia Enterprise upgrades to Release 4.4.0.0 from the baseline of Release 4.2.X and Release 4.3.X. If you have earlier versions of the product, you must perform a two-step upgrade: to Release 4.2.1.1, and then to Release 4.4.0.0.

App Designer

This release introduces a powerful and intuitive approach to building apps. It features a drag-and-drop interface, and an extensive array of customization options.

App Designer
To understand the App Designer interface, see Overview of App Designer.
Building Apps
For instructions on how to create apps and specify their structure, see Working with Apps.
Customizing Apps
Customizing Apps enables you to change the appearance of your apps: you can change the Settings or the Style of apps, or apply Custom Styling.

Visuals and Dashboards

Downloading Visuals as Excel Files

You can now download your visual data in Excel file format. The download includes a separate sheet in the Excel workbook for defining the filters of the visual. See Downloading Visual Data to Excel Files.

Downloading Dashboards as PDF Files
We added the following three options for PDF download:
Emailing Dashboards

If you choose to attach a PDF when e-mailing dashboards, you have the same three options as when downloading - current sheet with all visuals on one page, current sheet with each visual on a separate page, and the entire dashboard with each sheet on a separate page. See Immediate Email, Schedule-based Email and Threshold-based Email.

Enabling Visual Options
In this release, you must first enable the Visuals options under the Site Settings menu before exploring new visual types and animating transitions in visuals. See Enabling Visual Options.
Adding Color in Tables
For table visuals, we added a new menu, Table Colors, under the Style menu of the Visual Designer. You can now change the background and text color of the header, odd, even, and total rows, and also add a border. See Customizing Table Colors
Adjusting Table Column Width
With this release, you can manually adjust the width of a column in a table. See Adjusting Table Column Width.
Wrapping Column Content
In table visuals, you can now wrap content in columns. If the Wrap column content option is not selected, and the text does not fit the width of the column, you can hover over the text to view full text. See Wrapping Column Contents.
Refreshing Visuals Manually
If you have a slow back end data connection and your dashboard is taking too long to load, you now have an option to load the filters first and then manually load the visuals. See Refreshing Visuals Manually on Dashboard and Refreshing Visuals Manually.
Extending App Scope Filter to Dashboard Sheets
In a custom filter, if you select the Extend scope to all apps with this dashboard option, we have extended the filter scope to all sheets in the dashboard. The filter widget now displays a gray triangle on the top left corner. See Configuring Scope of Dashboard Filters.
Enabling Continuous Axis on Scatter Visuals
In a scatter visual, on non-aggregate numeric fields, you can make X and Y axis continuous. See Enabling a Continuous X Axis and Enabling Continuous Y Axis. You can also change the minimum and maximum scale of the continuous axis, to show a clearer representation of a visual. See Changing Scale of a Continuous X Axis and Changing Scale of Continuous Y Axis.
Enabling Continuous Axis on Dimensions
In Bar, Grouped Bars, Line, and Area visuals, if the dimension is a non-aggregate numeric field, you can make X and Y axis continuous. See Enabling a Continuous Axis on Dimensions. You can also change the minimum and maximum scale of the continuous axis, to show a clearer representation of a visual. See Changing the Scale of a Continuous Axis on Dimensions.
Enabling Independent Axis on Bullet Visuals
In Bullet visuals, you can set the trellis charts to their own axis. Navigate to the Trellis menu, and select Scale independently across trellis. See Enabling Independent Axis Scale.
Enabling Percentage Qualitative Ranges
On Bullet and Gauge visuals, instead of specifying the qualitative ranges as either a scalar or an expression, you can specify them as a percentage of the Compare To value. See Specifying Qualitative Range as Percentages
Changing the Marks Size Range
In Scatter and Map visuals, you can adjust the relative size of marks on the visual, such as circles in scatters or bubbles in maps, with a slider instead of manually entering a value in a text box. See Changing the Mark Size Range.
Adjusting the Number of Ticks
In the Bullet visual, you can specify an approximate tick count for the scalar axis. See Changing the Approximate Tick Count.
Orienting Bars Vertically
The default orientation of Bullet visuals is horizontal, but you can change them to vertical view. See Orienting Bars Vertically.
Removing the Default Label
For bullet visuals that do not specify custom labels, you can remove the default label by following the instructions in Removing the Default Label.
Including Null Values in Date Filters
This feature enables you to configure the date filter and display null values in the visuals. By default, the visual only displays values with a timestamp. See Including Null Values in Date Filters.
New Color Options for Flow and Funnel Visuals
Starting with this release, you can specify new colors for links (connections), highlights, and drop off nodes. See Customizing Visual Colors.
Filtering Data Using Legends
In dashboard Edit mode, you can filter on a particular element in the legend. You can also test the behavior of the filter before viewing the filter results in View mode. See Filter Data Using Legends.
Changing Column Position
In a table visual, you can change the position of a column for better visualization of data. See Column Position.
Enabling Animations
You can now enable animations on individual dashboards. After enabling the transition option at the site level, as described in Enabling Visual Options, you can proceed to Enabling Animations.

The visual types that use visual transitions include bars, lines, combo, area, scatter, grouped bar, histogram, sparklines, pie, packed bubbles, and correlation heat map.

Security Enhancements

Specifying SSL Private Key in RSA Format
In multi-process ArcViz setup, if you are using an encrypted SSL private key, the key must be in traditional RSA format. We've added instructions to specify a key in RSA format. See Cloudera: Installing an SSL Certificate on ArcViz Server.
Support Column-Level Authorization
In this release, we certify that ArcViz does not show columns obscured by column-level authorization.

Platform Enhancements

Multi-process ArcViz Configuration on Ambari Stacks
Starting this release, you can configure multi-process Arcadia Visualization Server on Ambari. In a multi-process configuration for the Arcadia Visualization Server (Arcviz), one master and multiple processes combine to serve many url requests, smoothly scaling with the number of users without loss of performance. See Setting up Multi-Process ArcViz on Ambari Stacks.
Proxy Group Configuration
On Cloudera and Ambari Stacks, proxy user can now delegate to one or more groups of users. See Cloudera: Proxy Group Configuration and Proxy Group Configuration on Ambari.

Usability Enhancements

More Subtle Notifications of Errors

We partially suppress the full error message report in ArcViz until you click on the expandable orange exclamation icon on the title of the visual to see the full error message.

Easier Selection Using Autocomplete
Autocomplete makes it easier to find items in lists, when:
  • Adding users to workspaces
  • Changing datasets in Visual Designer
  • Selecting tables in dataset definitions
Improved Navigation on Site Administration Interface
We improved usability of the Site Administration interface by adding a primary tab menu that shows all major setting options.
Better Contextual Information
Many options and features now have an information icon to further describe the impact of the selection and interaction with other features.

New Log Bundling Utility

You can now share a large number of relevant logs with customer support, to more easily troubleshoot ArcEngine activity. We built an interface for compiling and downloading log information based on your criteria of start time, duration, specific nodes, log levels, and processes. See ArcEngine Log Bundling Utility, ArcEngine Log Bundling User InterfaceArcEngine Log Bundling Command-Line Utility, ArcEngine Log Bundling Command Line Utility Options, and ArcEngine Log Bundling File.

Import and Export Utility

Custom Color
Starting with this release, the Export utility saves the definition of custom color palettes for import into the new system. See Supported Visual Artifacts.
Thumbnail Options
In this release, the Import utility enables you to choose whether to upload the thumbnails saved with the export file, to generate new thumbnails, or to skip thumbnail handling. See Thumbnail Support.

Videos in Documentation

List of Videos
In this release, we collated all videos embedded in our documentation. See a complete list here: Videos.
App Designer Video
We added this video on App Designer to show you how to effectively use this new feature. See Overview of App Designer.
Log Activity and Log Bundling Video
We added this video to help you highlight the Activity Logging interface, and introduce our powerful new Log Bundling feature. See ArcEngine Log Bundling Utility.
Eager Aggregation Video
In this release, we added a new video on Eager Aggregation, to help you understand some of the concepts behind this feature. We added Eager Aggregation to our product in Release 4.2.0.0. See Eager Aggregation.