MyTimetable 2.6 release notes

MyTimetable 2.6 'polishes' the 2.5 release and adds a couple of new features and enhancements. Also, we now support Capita UNIT-e as timetable source (thanks to Plymouth College of Art).

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

• Event type group filtering per subscription — Users now have the option to filter a timetable by activity type (event type group). Configuration of this feature depends on the specific wishes of the client, so this feature is disabled by default. Development of this feature was sponsored by Twente University (thanks!).

• New add timetable menu design — Data sources are now fully 'expanded' by default. Optionally, it is possible to define a data source as a 'secondary data source', which moves the timetable type selection to a sub-menu:

• Dynamically scaling graphical calendar — The size of 'activity boxes' in the graphical day and week calendars now dynamically scales depending on the size of the browser window.
• Department-based 'draft activity strategy' added — Activities can now be marked as draft based on a date set in a (user text) field of the associated Syllabus Plus department (thanks to the Karel de Grote-Hogeschool for this feature)
• Mobile interface accessibility improvements — Several changes have been made to the mobile interface, improving screen reader support for visually impaired users (changes sponsored by Hogeschool van Amsterdam, thanks).
• UNIT-e timetable provider added — It is now possible to read timetables from the Capita UNIT-e database. This implementation is still a bit 'rough', and will be further improved in upcoming MyTimetable versions.
• CSV export week label changes — Previous MyTimetable versions always included the ISO week numbers in the CSV exports, even if these week numbers were hidden in the MyTimetable web interface. This has now been fixed and the CSV export shows the same week numbers as the main interface. In some cases this will mean two columns of week numbers will be shown (timetable provider week numbers and ISO week numbers).
• Authorization based on the name of the API user — It is now possible to limit availability of certain timetable types to (specific) API users.
• Set user roles when accessing using the API and an elevated API token — This fixes issues where user-role restricted timetables were not available through the API.
• Disallow changes in non-removable subscriptions — Previously it was possible for users to change the student set or activity selection for automatically added (non-removable) subscriptions. Since these subscriptions are usually tailored to the user, it should not be possible to change these subscriptions.
• Allow excluding of named availabilities (terms) for a certain datasource — Thanks to Hogeschool van Amsterdam for this addition.
• Couple of help page improvements — Some outdated parts were removed and information on the Office 365 update interval was included.
• Fixes for student set selection in combination with jointly taught activities — Previously it was not possible to select student sets for JTA's.
• Improved UTF-8 support
• Option added to redirect SAML logouts to a specific URL — Using this setting, we can redirect users to an IdP-provided logout page, which ends the session, providing a better logout experience if SAML single logout is not available.
• Tablet users are now redirected to the mobile website — Our mobile website works better with tablets than the regular site. In the future we will be introducing a more responsive design, that scales well to all sizes. (2014-07-15)
• Removed the 'cache breaker' token for iPhone users — The cache breaker leads to duplicate subscriptions, and is not useful to iPhone users, since the iPhone offers the users an option to refresh the feeds. (2014-09-30)
• Subscription limit configurable per timetable type — The subscription limit introduced in version 2.5 has been further enhanced and can now be set per timetable type. The maximum number of module subscriptions has been increased to 35, and the maximum number of zone subscriptions has been decreased to 5. (2014-10-07)
• As usual, many small bug fixes and changes are included in this release. 47 issues were fixed in 97 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 c3p0 connection pool was replaced by HikariCP. This introduces a new datasource configuration format, explained in /wiki/spaces/MYTT/pages/3100246014. We believe this change leads to fewer, faster and more stable database connections.
• Dependencies upgraded:
  • MySQL connector (5.1.30)
  • Spring Mobile (1.1.0)
• Memory usage of the application has been reduced. Per-request memory is now freed as early as possible, leading to better application scalability. (2014-10-07)

Removed and deprecated features

None.