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(v23)  Composer 23.4 Enhancements

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Composer 23.4 Enhancements

This topic provides details about the enhancements in Composer 23.4. 

23.4.13 Feature Enhancements

Export Dates in ISO 8601 Format

You now have the option to export and share dates as an ISO 8601 date in XLSX format.

23.4.4 Feature Enhancements

Extended Elasticsearch Support

Composer now supports Elasticsearch versions 8.1 through 8.11.

23.4.1 Feature Enhancements

Prebuilt User Credentials - ${User.credentials}

Use the new user attribute, ${User.credentials}, to pass the Composer session ID (when working in Composer directly) or trusted access token (in embedded environments) through a connection to a data source.

If this attribute is found on upgrade, the existing attribute is renamed to ${User.Custom_Credentials}, allowing use of ${User.credentials} as designed.

See Use User Attributes for Connection Parameters.

Tenant Administration and Content Creation/Distribution Enhancements

With this release, Composer transforms your approach to tenant administration and content creation and distribution among different Composer tenants. Leverage the power of a centralized hub system administrators and content distributors use to push Visual content to your supported tenants.

Key Features:

  1. A unified content area allows your content creators to create and distribute new content to multiple tenants easily. Create, modify, and effortlessly push dashboards and visualizations to different tenants. Seamlessly update existing content by pushing the changes where needed. If no additional tenants are added, the default tenant Visual Data Discovery is used. Visual Data Discovery replaces the company tenant.

  2. Multi-tenancy enhancement. Streamlined tenant creation and content management means you can create tenants directly, then push the content you want them to see all from one place.

  3. Updated Group Roles. You can now easily add users in a tenant to specific groups that allow these users to manage and create, share, and maintain content as needed.

    • Members of the Content Distributors group can create, maintain, and distribute content to any tenants.

  4. Unified Administration. A new default user account, the system administrator wields the combined supervisor and admin capabilities. The system administrator can perform all tasks necessary to Composer management. This change means:

    • The superaccount work area is renamed to Visual Data Discovery.

    • The company tenant is no longer created by Composer for new installations, existing company tenants remain unchanged.

    • The default admin user is now the system administrator and has all supervisor user privileges, as a member of the Visual Data Discovery tenant.

    • The default supervisor user is no longer installed; add users to the Supervisors group instead.

    • Tenant Accounts are now known as Tenants in the user interface.

Enhanced Content Migration Flow

Streamline your content migration flow with the enhanced objects Export and Import Process:

  • Benefit from the bulk import and export of dashboards and sources; select tenants to include at import.

  • Choose an import strategy per object class — create a new version of the object, reuse the object, or update the existing version on the target environment while preserving permissions and IDs.

  • View real-time import validation results, address errors, and suppress warnings for later handling.

Breaking Changes Management

Composer now offers more robust breaking changes management when working with changes to data types and sources for fields or schemas in use by dashboards, visuals, and filter snippets.

When you make changes to a data source in use such as:

  • Changing the data type of a source field, derived field, or custom metric

  • Removing fields from inclusion in a data source

  • Changing the schema in use in a data source

Composer returns a verbose series of warnings about making such breaking changes. Review the returned list of affected visuals and filter snippets, and then decide to abort the change or proceed by selecting Ignore Warnings. Once you've saved your changes, navigate to the affected visuals and filter snippets to update the field used by each.

This works with conditional formatting, and when changing between all data types.

Data Gateway Service

Use the Data Gateway service to connect to your on-premise data sources from an instance of Composer running in the cloud. Install Data Gateway on your local network and by configuring Composer allow connection to the on-premise data sources of your choice.

Azure SQL Data Warehouse (Azure Synapse)

Offset is now supported when you connect to the Azure SQL Data Warehouse (Azure Synapse) using the Microsoft SQL Server connector. See Manage the Microsoft SQL Server Connector.

Expanded Search Options for Managing and Adding Visuals

More search and select options are available when you add an existing Visual Gallery visual to your dashboards. Expanded search options means you can:

  • Search for visuals by Type, Name, Description, Data Source, Tags, or Author.

  • Narrow the visuals shown or returned in search by selecting a filter option: All, Favorites, My Items, or Shared with Me.

  • If you search by tags, type, or data source, you can include multiple items in your search, returning all visuals that include at least one matching result.

Descriptions for Visuals

Use the analytics capabilities of Composer to generate descriptions of your visuals to dashboards with a few simple selections.

Quickly insert a visual description in a rich text snippet widget that summarizes the data shown in your visual. You can add multiple visual descriptions in individual widgets, or combine multiple visual descriptions in one or more widgets.

Edit the snippet to change the format, edit the contents of the generated description, edit description variables, insert images, links, and more.

Add URLs and Images to Table Visuals

Table visuals now support the inclusion of links to URLs or images in a table column. Select the option Format {field name} as URL to include a link to a URL or image by adding a URL with an interpolated value, such as http://www.website.com/${value}.

  • If you link to a URL, the destination URL opens in a new browser tab when the user selects the field.

  • If you link to an image, the interpolated image is shown in the table cell. Define height and width of the image as needed.

  • Clear the image or URL by selecting the None option in the Format as URL work area.

Hierarchical Fields in Filter Snippets

Create filter snippets to filter by Hierarchy data type for the hierarchical data included in your dashboards. Select a hierarchical field to add to the filter snippet, then select an operator: equals or descendants of or includes to build the conditions for filtering the data.

  • Equals or descendants of: Selecting the parent node selects all child nodes of the parent. Child nodes can't be deselected.

  • Include: Selecting the parent node selects all child nodes of the parent. Child nodes can be deselected as needed.

As with all filter snippets, you can search your hierarchical content defined in the Value Column to help you select and deselect the content to include.

See Manage Filter Snippets.

Content Tags for Visuals, Sorting, Filtering

We've expanded the use of content tags in Composer. You can now add tags to visuals, and use them to sort and organize content as you do with tags for dashboards and sources. Add a tag when you save or edit a visual in the Visual Gallery, or convert and add from a local visual from a dashboard to the Visual Gallery.

  • When you import and export dashboards, sources, and shared visuals to the Visual Gallery using the UI or API, any associated tags are included.

  • Sort and filter dashboards, sources, and shared visuals in the Visual Gallery using your tags; filter in specifically tagged items, or items with no tags to help you organize your content.

  • Extend the use of content tags, filtering, and sorting to users working with embedded instances of Composer.

See Use Tags in Composer.

Multi-Grouping for Box Plot Visuals

Box plot visuals can now include groups and subgroups: add a subgroup to expand the depth of the information you provide in this visual type.

See Box Plots.

Sunburst Visuals

Use the new visual type, Sunburst, to display hierarchical data in a circle format. Display up to three levels of data, starting with the topmost hierarchical data in the center of the sunburst, with the secondary and tertiary levels shown in levels further from the center.

Export Multiple Sources and Copy Sources

You can now easily export multiple sources and copy individual sources in your environment as needed.

  • Export multiple sources: Select the sources you want to export in the Source work area, then select Export Selected Items. All selected sources are downloaded to your browser, exported as one JSON file.

  • Copy a source: Open a source for editing, then select Copy Source. Enter a new Name for the copy of the source, and optionally a Description and Tags, then select Copy. The newly-named copy of your source is added to your data sources inventory, and you can continue editing your original source if needed.

Use the Sources API to send export requests for multiple sources, or copy requests for sources.

Other Bucket Grouping Options

A new feature, Show Other, allows you show or hide data in several visual types normally hidden when you define a limit for your data.

For example, enable Show Other for a pie chart of data sorted into twenty five counties, with a Limit of ten. Eleven slices are shown: the fifteen other counties are grouped as a single slice, comprising the remaining data succinctly. Disable Show Other in the sidebar menu, or by selecting Remove from the context menu of that data point.

This feature is available in the Sort & Limit sidebar menu of several visuals:

  • Bar charts
  • Donut (single group)
  • Pie (single group)
  • Packed bubbles
  • Scatter plot
  • Tree map
  • Heatmap (single group)

Improved Analytical Capabilities

This release brings extensive updates to custom metrics. We've added time and time conversion functions, as well as a number of string manipulation functions to expand the range of possible calculations you can use in your environment.

Toggle Static Legends

You can now enable static legends for individual visuals as needed. If a static legend is available for a visual, enable or disable it in the Color sidebar menu. In embedded environments, this is configured at the dashboard level on a per-dashboard basis.

Refresh Data in Embedded Environments

Use the EmbedManager method component.refreshData() to refresh the data in an embedded dashboard. See Embedded Dashboard Properties and Objects

 

 

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