MyTimetable 3.4 release notes

MyTimetable 3.4 adds various functionalities requested by several customers. Using the iCalendar data provider, it is trivial to provision holiday or special event calendars for your staff and students. Most of these developments were funded by the University of York (thanks!).

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

• Add possibility to target messages by user role — Administrative messages can be targeted to one or more specific user roles and will only be shown to these users. This makes it possible to show certain messages only to staff or students.
• 'Friendly' role descriptions — For Universities with many different roles, it is now possible to define 'friendly' role names. These will be shown in the interface instead of the formal role name. For now, the implementation of this is based on custom code, and thus requires some work from Eveoh.
  
• iCalendar data provider: admin panel added — Using the iCalendar feed admin panel, a user can define one or more timetables and point them to any iCalendar feed on the internet. This makes it super easy to add a holiday calendar to your MyTimetable instance.
  
• Added 'recorded' flag to events and 'recordingUrl' property — This will show an icon and label in the interface and various exports if the event is being recorded, and optionally link to the event's recording.
• Added travel time warning to events — When MyTimetable detects a change between buildings, it can show a travel time warning if the users have limited travel time available.
  
• Publication rules: match on custom attribute — The rule engine now permits matching on a 'custom' attribute, which can be mapped to any field of a data provider. E.g., remove or adjust an activity based on S+ section or user text fields.
• Publication rules: match on event type or event type group — The rule engine now permits a match on event type or event type group.
• Publication rules: added set start/end time and set to all day action — These actions make it possible to create all-day or overlapping activities without having to create these conflicts in the backing data provider.
• 'Sync timetable' check box default state changed (when adding a timetable) — Timetables will now only be synced if the user has no personal subscriptions and if the box was enabled the last time. This means that the box will be disabled by default, if the user already has a personal timetable.
• Better entity schema management introduced — Displayed attributes and labels will be the same in all channels: desktop, mobile, exports, iCalendar and push synchronisations.
• Syllabus Plus data provider: added custom attributes — Any fields from the Syllabus database can be added to the timetable activities.
• Exam Scheduler data provider: event type support added — The Exam Scheduler data provider can now add an event type to events.
• Small naming changes — Some labels were changed in the interface, e.g., code was changed to course. These labels can be replaced by the old label on a per-customer basis.
• Sensitivite attributes — Certain attributes can be marked as sensitive. These attributes will not be included in iCalendar and push synchronisation exports.
• Specific permission-levels in administrative panel — It is possible to create users with limited access rights to the admin panel. At the moment this only includes 'messages-only' users.
• API: added /terms endpoint — This endpoint returns all terms (periods / named availabilities) defined in the various data sources, which can be used to make an export for a certain period.
• API: added more detailed event type and event type group information — The /timetable and /timetables responses now include the identifier, description and color of the event type and event type group.

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 'cache breaker' has been removed from the iCalendar-feed URL in the /user response.
• Various technical improvements and bug fixes were made to the Google Calendar push synchronisation.
• Added autodiscover per target mailbox to the Exchange push synchronisation. This makes it possible for the EWS-based sync to work in a hybrid O365/Exchange scenario.
• Some XML context files have changed names, this requires an update of the data source configuration when upgrading MyTimetable (replace .xml with .ctx.xml)
• Dependency upgrades:
  • GWT (2.8.1)

Removed and deprecated features

The following features from earlier MyTimetable versions have been deprecated, removed, or partially removed and are not supported anymore:

• Support for Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 has been deprecated. These browsers are no longer supported by Microsoft and most users have upgraded to Internet Explorer 11 or another browser.
• The deduplicate option has been removed. Events that exist in multiple timetables will now always be shown only once. We could not think of a use case to show them multiple times.