MyTimetable 2.7 release notes

MyTimetable 2.7 is a relatively minor 'feature release', in which we have added some small features requested by customers. Most of these features require customer-specific configuration, and are therefore not enabled by default. Please let us know if you would like to use any of these features.

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

Functional changes

• Overview pages now feature pagination — This makes it easier to work with long lists of timetables
  
• Added PDF week export to location view — You can now export a graphical week PDF of a location or zone timetable.
• Department-, date- and role-based timetable release — Timetables can now be released to different user groups on different dates, based on the department of the Syllabus Plus activity. The release dates can be entered in one of the user text fields of the Syllabus Plus department object.
• 'Clip' activity start and end time based on tags — It is now possible to 'cut off' a configured amount of minutes from the start or end time of an activity, based on Syllabus Plus tags assigned to an activity.
• More flexible schedule postprocessing — The features above were made possible by a rewrite of our schedule 'postprocessing' system. If you have any other custom requirements, it is probably easier to implement these now, drop us an email if you are interested.
• Added Welsh translation — Thanks to Cardiff University for this.
• Allow multiple sets of week labels — Using some custom configuration in Syllabus Plus, multiple sets of week labels can be used. This way, it is possible to show different week labels to undergraduate and graduate students, or show week labels based on the user's department.
• Fixed 'previous period', 'next period' and 'today' navigation buttons — The buttons were sometimes disabled for no good reason.
• Added support for Syllabus Plus 'Tag' timetables — A timetable can now consist of all activities tagged by the timetabler with a certain tag, which makes it possible to show a timetable for things like 'all recorded lectures'.
• Added caching headers to all responses — This prevents users from seeing outdated timetables in certain corner cases.
• Support all-day events in iCalendar feeds.
• Fixed various bugs in timezone and weekend handling.
• UNIT-e improvements — Activities can now be marked as draft based on a weekpattern defined in UNIT-e. Also the staff timetable provider supports child subscriptions per staff appointment (with a separate entry for all non-appointment activities). (2015-02-12)
• As usual, many small bug fixes and changes are included in this release. 113 issues were fixed in 179 commits.

Non-functional, technical and back-end changes

The following changes have been made to the MyTimetable backend and underlying software, and have no direct impact on MyTimetable functionality:

• The date of last login (using the GWT, Mobile, API or iCal feeds) is now saved in the user profile. This makes it possible to remove inactive user accounts in the future.
• Added default LDAP read timeout of 3 seconds.
• Various performance improvements were made to the retrieval of personal iCalendar feeds.
• Various performance improvements in the retrieval of API tokens.
• Debug logging of accepted API requests was added (method, URI, query string and requested auth). Enable logback debug logging for nl.eveoh.scheduleviewer.authentication.api.ApiAuthenticationProcessingFilter to view the logs. (2015-01-29)
• Added more flexible handling of user roles. A custom role provider can now be used for SAML authentication, which makes it possible to retrieve the roles from a third party system (instead of from SAML attributes). (2015-02-13)
• Default / auto-added timetables are now only updated with once per session (for interactive logins) or once per 65 minutes (for API / iCal requests). The former was already the case, but the latter functionality is new and should lower the load on the backend systems. (2015-02-16)
• AD attributes are now cached for 4 hours, which should lower the load on application servers. (2015-02-16)
• A concurrent request filter was added to delay requests for the iCal feed of the same user. This is because many iPhone users added multiple copies of the same feed, and the iPhones trigger an update of all feeds at the same time. This requests are now handled one by one instead of in parallel, optimising caching and application server load. (2015-02-16)
• The Syllabus Plus 'Globals' (Institution) cache is now reused if the V_GLOBAL view happens to be empty. This works around a bug in RDB 3.2.0 and 3.2.2, where empty views are sometimes exposed during an update. (2015-02-16)
• Upgraded dependencies:
  • Spring Security (3.2.5)

Removed and deprecated features

None.