Page Comparison

The development of MyTimetable 2.1 focussed on further refining and polishing MyTimetable, and implementing some of the features that were dropped from MyTimetable during the upgrade from 1.7 to 2.0. Also, during the development of MyTimetable 2.1 we moved all development and issue tracking to GitHub, and further streamlined our development processes. Furthermore, many internal changes have been made to ease future upgrades and extensions to MyTimetable.2 focuses on desktop interface improvements, code refactoring and several small interface improvements.

All work involved in upgrading to the latest MyTimetable version (configuration, building, testing) is free of charge for our customers with a Software Assurance support agreement.

Functional changes

• New export menu— The new export menu is a drop-down menu that should explain the different export options more clearly to the user. Also, it is now possible to export individual timetables. The export period dialog has also been redesigned for a better user experience.
• iCalendar feed and API are now stateless — This fixes an important bug were user profiles were sometimes not updated if the iCalendar client remembered the session cookies and kept the session active (mainly Outlook users had this issue).
• Draft activity styling update — The styling of draft activities has been updated. Also, the draft indicator has been added to the month and availability view:
• Role-based security — For each timetable type it is possible to specify which roles should have access. These access permissions are enforced across all channels (desktop, mobile and API). Roles can be retrieved from various sources, like LDAP groups or a custom database.

• Field formatter changes — The formatter that is used for each field shown in the interface (e.g., description, type name, module code) has been rewritten and now uses SpEL expressions. This makes it possible to parse and show the timetabling data in many formats, combine fields, and even retrieve extra data from external data sources to show in the user interface.
• Timetable suggestions — The former 'add from Blackboard' timetable option has been reworked to a more generic 'add timetable suggestions' option. This option makes it possible to suggest timetables to the user (retrieved from for instance a student information system) without automatically adding them. This proves useful if the information in the other system is not 100% reliable, but still of use to most users.
• OAuth token removal has been reintroduced — It is now possible to remove OAuth authorisations given to applications from the Settings menu. This was removed / unimplemented in 2.0 and now has been re-added.
• Several improvements to text labels and the interface:
  • Labels in list views have been improved.
  • iCal has been renamed to Apple Calendar.
  • Check box and radio button styling is now the same across all platforms.
• Mobile interface timetable types — The mobile interface supports more timetable types (student, activity group).
• Mobile interface browser warning — The mobile interface shows a warning message if it is visited by an unsupported browser (desktop browsers or old Android versions), or if the browser of the user has some trouble with daylight saving time (Blackberry).
• Overview export option — The overview pages now have a link to quickly export this or next week's timetable to PDF.
• API improvements — Together with some of the API users at Inholland University, several features and bug fixes were added to the API:
  • New filter options have been added, to filter by student set group and other types.
  • The date format has been improved, now both the Unix timestamp as well as the ISO date format are supported. Also, it is possible to specify 'today' or 'tomorrow' instead of a specific date.
  • The subscription list can be filtered by type.
  • The /v0/user method was added to retrieve the user name and iCalendar feed URL.
  • API tokens can be configured to require OAuth authentication.
  • The source filtering was fixed, API list methods now return exactly the same data as shown in the MyTimetable user interface.
• Improved styling of help, 404 and error pages — The pages now match the institution's corporate style more closely.
• Requirelogin parameter — Using the URL parameter  is is now possible to force a user to login (e.g., to show his or her personal timetable instead of starting a guest session).
• Activity groups — MyTimetable now supports activity group timetables.
• Save user roles for iCalendar feed access — Previously, the roles of a user were not saved or cached. This causes issues when accessing the application using token authentication (like the iCalendar feed), since the roles of the user are unavailable at that moment. The roles of a user are now saved on the start of each session, and reused if the role information is unavailable.
• Collapsed by default — An option added to add subscriptions in collapsed state by default.
• Several other important bugfixes were made:
  • ISO week numbering for week 53/week 1 sometimes showed an incorrect week number.
  • Switching database or view sometimes caused an error due to invalid URL parameters.
  • The month view sometimes showed an incorrect number of weeks.
  • The month view sometimes threw an exception if the date was changed before the events for the current date had been retrieved.
• Reintroduce OpenSSO support — OpenSSO is now fully supported again, and can be configured by installing the OpenSSO agent and enabling the auth-opensso Spring profileCalendar navigation improvements — The calendar views have been refactored and the previous, today and next buttons have moved to the calendar views. Also, the calendar top bar has been redesigned and the 'list' and 'list (condensed)' views have been integrated to limit the number of tabs:

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• Overlapping activities — Overlapping activities in the list view can now be highlighted. When hovering over an overlapping activity, its concurrent activities are shown:

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• Warning message — A message can be shown in the activity list, next to a timetable. This can be used to show the value of a user text field of the specific entity:

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• Subscription list export — The PDF and CSV export now support exporting the list of timetables of the current user:

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• Student set selection — It is now possible to change the student sets selected for a subscription, and to select multiple student sets (where applicable).
• Draft status by activity tag — The draft status of a timetable activity can now be determined from the tags of the activity.
• Student search — The add student timetable dialog now supports searching for a student in a similar view to the other timetable types (optional).
• Module viewer improvements — The module viewer now supports linking to a certain timetable including a timetable selection, more information is available at: URL parameters.
• iCalendar feed names — The iCalendar feed names have been changed to incorporate information about the subscription(s) being exported.
• Web font icons — Several of the smaller icons in the interface now use a web font instead of an image. This makes it possible to easily change the colour of these elements to match the corporate styling of the customer.
• Drop down menu improvements — The drop down menus now feature a small delay to make it easier to navigate the menus.
• LDAP roles by DN — An DnRolesLdapUserDetailsMapper was added to support retrieving LDAP roles using the users login name or organizational unit instead of LDAP groups.
• Export URL — The exporter code has been refactored and the export URL has been shortened to /export.
• Settings dialog — The settings dialog has been refactored to match the rest of the interface.
• iCalendar feed result limiting — It is possible to limit the iCalendar feed results to a number of weeks before and after the current date.

• API: fetch timetable by hostkey — It is now possible to retrieve a timetable using the configured hostkey, instead of the identifier, with the parameters type=<timetabletype> and fetchBy=hostKey.

• Zimbra pre-auth filter — It is now possible to use Zimbra pre-auth to authenticate with MyTimetable.
• Mobile logout button — A button was added to perform a logout in the mobile interface.

Non-functional, technical and back-end changes

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• Tomcat 6 and Java 6 support has been deprecated, since Java 6 is end of life. We recommend upgrading to Tomcat 7 and Java 7.
• Eclipse support has been removed. Eveoh moved to IntelliJ IDEA a while ago, and thus we cannot support the Eclipse build environment anymore.