Release of REI3.7

gabriel

We´re back in 2024 with a new feature release, REI3.7 - let´s have a look!

Custom translations and caption maps

While REI3 always supported multi-language applications, authors had to provide and keep languages up-to-date. This now changes. In REI3.7, any admin can add new languages to existing applications and provide their own translations. Even better, these custom translations can then be exported, shared and imported by the original application author, if they want to officially support a language.

Custom translations

Custom translations are done in the admin panel with our new 'caption map', a overview of all titles, labels, help texts and so on. This caption map is also available inside the Builder for application authors to check and correct translated values from all parts of their applications.

Many days of work have gone into this feature. We hope that it provides a lot of value.

Triggers on steroids

Relation triggers are a very powerful tool, used to execute changes, apply business logic or limit actions. But they always had a key limitiation: They could only work within their own application.

With REI3.7, we´ve reworked triggers so that they can react to changes in built-on applications. This means that you can not only expand existing applications with data and user interfaces, but also apply your own rules & events. If something changes in another application, you can easily react to it with a trigger and then create a task or send a notification - or even block the action if you have a reason for it.

Trigger

To create a trigger for a relation in another application, you create a new backend function of the type 'trigger' and then assign the trigger inside the new function.

Field sizing changes

The REI3 form layout engine is optimized for allowing large amounts of input fields on very different screen sizes. Because of this, sizing is done not for each field individually but for entire rows or columns. This works very well for horizontal sizing, but while some fields can easily grow vertically, many look off when not correctly sized.

Before this release, fields would take both horizontal as well as vertical size from their parents and grow automatically. In REI3.7, we´ve changed that behaviour so that only fields that benefit from vertical growth, actually do grow. This is a breaking change that does have some drawbacks, mostly that there is less control in how fields are sized and that some existing forms will look different after the change. However, in the vast amount of cases, it should make building forms easier and make unoptimized layouts look better, as vertical sizing does not need to be configured for many fields.

New field size behaviour

This is not a change we did lightly but we believe the benefits are much larger than the drawbacks. We hope you agree.

OAuth2 support for mailing

Many organizations running REI3, use cloud-services such as Office365 for mailing. We´ve now added the ability to register REI3 as an OAuth2 client, which can be used for authentication in email accounts. Templates for O365 are offered in the admin panel, a short guide on how setup works on the provider side is also available.

OAuth2 Client

Redesigned application cache

We´ve redesigned the way REI3 manages application caches so that much less data needs to be reloaded and sent to clients when changes are done or updates are installed. This results in less bandwidth required and shorter loading times when working in the Builder. This also speeds up access to an updated REI3 instance on a mobile connection.

And more shiny things

With OAuth2 clients and expiring secrets, we´ve felt the need to add a notification system for admin contacts. It will send out email notifications when important system events occur. For now, it will react to upcoming expiration of OAuth2 clients and system licenses.
When sorting list batched columns, all column values are now used to sort with. Before, only the first valid column value would be used.
The REI3 platform can now apply proxy settings for update checks, repository updates and application downloads.
A new frontend function allows expert authors to apply custom ECharts options to chart fields. With this, authors are not limited by what options REI3 supports and can use all features of the ECharts library.
PDF files can now be uploaded to file inputs after creation. This option is available in the 'pdf_create()' frontend function and skips the document download that is otherwise offered.
For new installations, the integrated database engine is now Postgres 16.1 (standalone/portable deployments only). Existing installations will stay with the older version (Postgres 13.7) as we cannot safely automate the upgrade process. Because the integrated database engine is only used by REI3 and fulfills all requirements, an update is optional. A manual upgrade is possible and can improve system performance.
Reworked the user interface for the application management page in the admin panel.
... and many more small fixes and improvements.

Upgrade notes

This release does not need any special upgrade steps.

On Windows: Run the installer.
On Linux systems: Stop the service, extract the latest release, replace the r3 binary, start the service.

Thank you all for your continued support and feedback. For the full list of changes, take a look at the technical change log.

YogiYang

gabriel

Thanks for this update.

I was looking forward for caption translation feature.

I would like to suggest one thing here.

If possible please give direct download link to new version in all those post which announces new release/updates of REI3.

fmvalsera

Thank you very much for this great release plenty of features.
I'm looking forward to trying It!
👏👏

gabriel

YogiYang
Hello Yogi,
I avoid duplication work when I can (stuff like updating links for every post) - all download links are always available directly from https://rei3.de/en/downloads.

If you need a link where you can directly get the lastest version, you can also use the 'latest' links from the download page, such as: https://rei3.de/latest/x64_installer

Is this helpful or is it mostly a preference to directly download from the post?

jimmurray

I hate to be the whiner here but yes, you added OAUTH support to the platform which makes the e-mail functinality once again usable with Office365. Unfortunately you've restricted that functionality behind a paywall.

Restricting LDAP I can understand, it's clearly an enterprise feature. Restricting something as basic as the ability to send and recieve email using the dominant email providers (Google also require OAUTH) however is not and really should be part of the basic functionality.

Are there any plans to make email usable again?

gabriel

jimmurray
I can understand the frustration. We do internally debate which features to add to R3 Professional - and we had the discussion as well for the OAuth feature.

It´s a tricky thing and I personally would prefer to make everything freely available. And in some way it already is - anyone can get the source code, change the few lines of code to active all features and use everything as they please. There is nothing hidden or proprietary.

We decide to add some new features to R3 Professional because there are very few organizations that voluntarily pay for the thousands of hours that go into a large software such as R3. They use it, benefit from it but most do not support it. And because it would suck hard to put application features (like display options, attribute types, permission control, functions, ...) behind a pay wall, we are very limited in what features we can even restrict.

Yes, OAuth support is a common requirement in modern environments. But it´s also something that is strictly speaking optional. You can still send and receive emails by using other tools/services to fetch/send mails via Oauth2 and then access them with R3 via basic auth for example. It is more work and might be annoying, but that is kinda the point of any restrictive license.

What level of features or functionality needs to be restricted to get the right amount of paying customers without annoying everybody else too much - that is the tricky part. We make sure to only consider restrictions for new features and to always support the free use of the platform. OAuth authentication however, will stay part of R3 Professional.

Sorry for the text wall btw. - I also dislike many licensing terms and got burnt many times in the past, so I felt the need to explain our current thinking.

YogiYang

gabriel Is this helpful or is it mostly a preference to directly download from the post?

For me it is a preference to be able to download directly (or redirected to the download page) from here.

TakadaGuna

Hello,

Just a quick question, is it already possible to custom translate UI messages like error messages in 3.7 ?

Thank you.

gabriel

TakadaGuna
The update brings the option to overwrite all application captions, this includes titles, descriptions and also errors.

But some errors do not come from applications but the platform itself. Stuff like authentication or access errors. Stuff like that belongs to the platform and is translated via these files. If you need a new language added, you can create such a file in your desired language. We can then add it to the next patch release.

TakadaGuna

gabriel I am interested in creating such file in my language, but wondering what happens when there is platform updates (both major and minor updates) and there are additional things to translate. Would it break the translation or would it simply fallback to english for the ones that don't have translation? Would I need to maintain the files for future updates?

Thanks in advance, Gabriel.

gabriel

TakadaGuna
It would fall back to english, and you are not required to keep it up-to-date. Even a partial translation can help a lot if the most important things are translated (like basic actions). Most community translations are not complete.