MyTimetable 3.2 release notes

MyTimetable 3.2 is a release adding some larger features to the administrative interface of MyTimetable. Many of these features were sponsored by the Arteveldehogeschool, for which we would like to thank them. Also, this version adds Scientia Exam Scheduler to the list of supported data providers.

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

• Service messages — Service messages can be added through the administrative panel and are shown to the end-users in the desktop and mobile interface. They can be used to announce maintenance or instruct users about other important events. In the future, the same interface will be used for an overview of all notifications.
  
• Better export download dialog — The dialog shown when exporting a selection of timetables has been improved. The presets shows depend on the context and the default date range selection matches the date range shown in the web interface.
   
• Help page improvements — Various texts in the help page have been improved and updated for the new Apple iOS version. Also, the iCalendar and mobile synchronisation options are only shown to authenticated users now, to make it possible to tailor the page to the access permissions of the user.
• Syllabus Plus staff timetables show modules in subscription list — A staff timetable will show all modules the staff member has activities for. Modules were already shown for student set and programme of study timetables, and have been added to the staff timetables.
• Support for Syllabus Plus 'section' timetables — The Syllabus Plus provider can now show a 'section' timetable, consisting of all activities attached to a section.
• Support for Scientia Exam Scheduler — Student exam timetables can be fetched directly from the Scientia Exam Scheduler database.
• iCalendar history limited to 12 weeks — To ensure a consistent performance for end users, iCalendar-feeds have been limited to 12 weeks history. On request, this setting can be changed to another value, but we recommend keeping it at the default for the best performance. 
• External calendar sync: remove 'stop sync and leave activities' option — The option to stop the external calendar synchronisation to Exchange/Office 365/Google without removing activities in the future has been removed from the user interface. There is no good use case for this option and it only leads to users ending up with multiple copies of activities in their calendar.
• Automated warning for test and acceptance environments — The site, iCalendar feeds and calendar integrations now automatically show a warning if the user is visiting a non-production MyTimetable instance. This warning informs users of possible outdated timetables.
   
• PLANNED Admin: detailed request statistics — Eveoh managed hosting customer can view detailed statistics on the number of requests, response times and external calendar synchronisations in the administrative panel.
   
• Admin: user listing and impersonation feature — In the administrative interface, a list of all users, a user details page and an user impersonation feature were added. These features aim to improve end user support by customer's support desk.
   
• Admin: Piwik statistics added — For customers using Piwik, it is now possible to embed the Piwik statistics in the administrative panel.
• Mobile: manual iCal-feed details — The mobile interface now shows the link to the iCalendar-feed and gives the user the option copy this link and connect the iCalendar-feed manually.
• Mobile: improved titles — Titles of various mobile pages have been improved (e.g., the timetable search now shows the type of timetable the user is searching for).
• Mobile: search button — A search button was added to the input fields in the mobile interface.
• Mobile: link to help page — A link to the help page was added to the mobile interface.
• Mobile cookie handling — If a user chooses to use the desktop interface instead of the mobile interface, this setting will be persisted on the device in a cookie. This feature broke in a previous MyTimetable version and has been restored.
• Out-of-the-box support for Syllabus Plus activities with attached OSIRIS data — The groups from OSIRIS ('werkvormen' and 'toetsen') can be automatically shown in MyTimetable. This was already the case at certain customer sites, but the implementation has now been moved to the main repository, improving maintainability. 
• Audit logging — Audit logging was added to the administrative panel, which shows important actions by users and administrators (impersonation, user deletion and synchronisation start and stop). The audit log is kept for 90 days.

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:

• iCalendar feed tokens are now linked to the specific timetable the user is requesting (personal or individual timetable). This improves security by making it impossible to request another timetable under the user context if the user shares one of their iCalendar-feed links with another person.
• WOFF2 fonts were added, reducing font download size for modern browsers.
• The Office 365 connector has been reimplemented, improving speed and reliability. This change also removes the internal MyTimetable details from the event details, as these details are kept in Office 365 Data Extensions now.
• Various reliability improvements in the Google Calendar connector.
• All cookies are now HttpOnly. An option has been added to use secure cookies which is true by default.
• SAML maximum response skew has been increased to 180 seconds from 60 seconds. The old limit was often breaking the SAML login if the customer's SAML IdP clock was out of sync.
• GZip compression has been disabled in GWT, as this is normally done by Apache Tomcat or the reverse-proxy fronting MyTimetable.
• Many dependencies were upgraded, the most important ones:

  • Spring (4.3.6)

  • Spring Integration (4.3.7)
  • GWT (2.8.0)
  • Guava (20)
  • Gradle (3.3)
  • Jackson (2.8.5)
  • HikariCP (2.5.1)
  • slf4j (1.7.22)
  • Logback (1.1.8)
  • MySQL Connector Java (5.1.40)
  • commons-io (2.5)
  • ActiveMQ (5.14.3)
  • CXF (3.1.9)
  • Spring Mobile (1.1.5)
  • OpenCSV (3.8)
  • Joda time (2.9.7)
  • Apache POI (3.15)
  • Javassist (3.21.0-GA)
  • AspectJ (1.8.10)

  • iCal4j (2.0.0)

Removed and deprecated features

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

• xCal support was removed from MyTimetable, as we are not aware of any users using this functionality.