Portofino 4.0.8 released!

Posted on December 03, 2012 by Alessio Stalla

We’re proud to announce the release of Portofino 4.0.8, the newest version of our framework. This release is focused on maintainance and strengthening of existing features, especially text pages (CMS) and the wizard, as well as bugfixing; details follow.

Improved CMS experience

We have improved text pages in a number of ways, making editing and publishing content on your applications easier than ever! The editor is automatically sized to fill available vertical space. We have also added a site browser to easily wire internal links - even to deeply nested detail pages! You'll be able to navigate the whole application and choose any page you want.

Attachments are now stored together with the owning page (that is, in the same directory), so you can copy and move pages around safely. Old applications are automatically migrated to the new structure.

Last but not least, we have removed a few buttons from the default CKEditor toolbar that were not used, such as the Save and Preview buttons.

Better wizard

The wizard is now more tightly integrated with the connection providers section of the administration panel; it is no longer a special page in the application itself. When you create a new connection, you immediately enter the wizard; you can choose to create pages automatically, or select which pages to generate. Additionally, we've made sure that the wizard can be run multiple times on the same data source.

You can run the wizard on an existing database connection provider

When creating a new connection provider, after choosing the JDBC driver, the connection string field is automatically populated with a template specific for that driver:

Oh, and JNDI connection providers are now supported! You can configure the database connection in your application server and keep the Portofino model independent from actual connection parameters. Deploying to multiple, heterogeneous machines becomes easier!

Better CRUD and persistence

The CRUD page is arguably one of Portofino's strongest points, so this time again we made sure to fix a few bugs and throw in a couple of improvements.

You can mark text columns/properties as rich text:

Rich text column

When viewing a crud detail page, rich text content is automatically stripped of potentially dangerous HTML, you don't have to worry about it.

Another improvement in CRUD pages is proper support for selection providers in search forms. Now you get several display modes: dropdown lists, autocomplete fields, and checkboxes.

We've also simplified the configuration a bit by eliminating the "paginated" flag: from now on, a CRUD is implicitly paginated if the number of rows per page is specified. To avoid nasty surprises, new CRUD pages are, by default, paginated with 10 rows per page, just like before. However, if you upgrade to this version, you should review your existing CRUD pages.

Finally, we've improved support for the Oracle database by introducing a workaround for a bug in certain versions of the Oracle JDBC driver, which fail to report the DECIMAL SQL type among the supported ones, but then return DECIMAL as the type of some columns.

Miscellanea

Most of the remaining changes are little UI fixes that we can gloss over. It is worth mentioning an important point about URL rewriting. We've been shipping with the Tuckey URL rewrite filter for quite a long time, but with this release we decided to move the rules defined in urlrewrite.xml (all enforcing security policies) to filters written in Java. urlrewrite.xml then remains available to those who customize Portofino, without the burden of keeping the file in sync with the mainline one.

So, we invite you to try the new version and give us feedback! As a reminder, you can download it from here. If you have issues or suggestions, please come to our community forums and we’ll be happy to help you! Finally, if you need commercial support, we offer several options.