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5.4 Release Notes

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Version 5.4 of the platform was released on January 18th, 2023.

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For instructions on how to upgrade to the latest version of Cinchy, see here.

New Rich Text Editing Capabilities in Forms​

Customize the appearance of your Form text with our new rich text editing capabilities. Enabling this on your text columns will give you access to exciting new formatting options previously unavailable in Forms such as:

  • Bold, Italic, Underlined text
  • Checklists
  • Headers
  • Hyperlinks
  • etc.

For more information on how to make a visual impact with our new rich text editing capabilities, please review the documentation here.

Editable GUIDs​

A GUID is a globally unique identifier, formatted as a 128-bit text string, that represents a unique ID. All Cinchy Tables and Columns have a GUID.

You now have the ability to display and edit table and column GUIDs within the Design Table screen.

This feature is particularly useful when deploying between Cinchy instances.

For example, in a model deployment, you must have matching GUIDs on your columns in order for them to properly load between environment A and environment B. There might be times when these GUIDs don’t automatically match, however, such as if you manually added a new column to environment B and also manually added it to environment A.

In this case, the two columns would have different GUIDs, and the model deployment would fail. With this new capability, however, you can match up conflicting GUIDs to properly load your model.

Table GUID

Column GUID

Polling Event Data Sync​

Version 5.4 of the Cinchy platform introduces data polling, which uses the Cinchy Event Listener to continuously monitor and sync data entries from your SQL Server or DB2 server into your Cinchy table. This capability makes data polling a much easier, effective, and streamlined process and avoids implementing the complex orchestration logic that was previous necessary to capture frequently changing data.

You can read more about setting up Data Polling here.

BigInt Upgrade Utility​

A mandatory database upgrade script was introduced in v5.2 that increased the number of possible Cinchy IDs that can be generated (read the releases note here). To streamline this process further, we've created a utility to deploy the changes. This should save you valuable time and resources when performing the upgrade, even on large databases.

New Platform Default Timeout​

For new environments (or if your setting was previously left blank), we've changed the Cinchy default session timeout from 30 minutes to 7 days. This will keep you logged in and working without interruptions. You can further change or revert this session timeout value in your appsettings.json.

In an IIS deployment, you can find the value in your CinchySSO > appsettings.json

"ConfigSettings": {
  "AppSettings": {
    "CinchyAccessTokenLifetime": "7.00:00:00"
  }
}

In a Kubernetes deployment, you can find the value in your deployment.json file.

// The Cinchy session timeout
"cinchy_session_timeout" : "7.00:00:00",

Enhancements​

danger

Because of the .NET update, if you are upgrading to 5.4+ on an SQL Server Database you will need to make a change to your connectionString. Adding TrustServerCertificate=True will allow you to bypass the certificate chain during validation.

In an IIS Deployment you must update your connectionString in your Cinchy SSO and Cinchy appsettings.json.

In a Kubernetes deployment you must update your connectionString in your deployment.json.

  • We've added a silent refresh to the Connections experience to keep your session active while you're on the UI and to keep you working without interruptions.
  • Real time data sync will now continue to retry if an "Out of Memory Exception" is thrown, avoiding unnecessary downtime.
  • You now have the ability to choose between Debian or Alpine based Docker images when using a Kubernetes deployment of the Cinchy platform to be able to connect to a DB2 data source in Connections.
    • When either installing or upgrading your platform, you can use the following Docker image tags for the listener, worker, and connections:
      • Alpine: "5.x.x"
      • Debian: "5.x.x-debian"
  • You now have the option to update the default passwords for Grafana and OpenSearch in a Kubernetes deployment by configuring your deployment.json file. See here for instructions on updating Grafana and here for OpenSearch.
  • We've increased the average throughput for CDC subscriptions returning the Cinchy ID, so that it will now be able to process a greater number of events per second. Being able to reliably exceed 1000 events per second, based on the average use case, means that you can leverage the CDC capability for more demanding use cases.
  • Before this release, the Files API could only handle files up to 100mb. We've now upped the maximum default file size to 1GB and have added a configurable property to allow you to set your own upload size.
    • In an IIS deployment, you can find the value in your Cinchy > appsettings.json
“ConfigSettings”: {
	“AppSettings”: {
		“MaxRequestBodySize”: 1073741824 // 1g
  • In a Kubernetes deployment, you can find the value in your deployment.json file.
// this field defaulted at 1gb, dictates the max file upload size set in the web appsettings.json
"web_max_request_body_size" : 1073741824,
caution

When choosing your maximum upload size, keep in mind that large files may slow down your database if you are using local storage.

Bug Fixes​

  • We've fixed an error that occurred when attempting a data sync with conflicting target and source data types in link columns, where the error message would read: Value must be specified from the available options
  • We've fixed an issue that was preventing new Connection jobs from starting when a previous job got stuck.
  • We've fixed an issue where data syncs would fail if your sync key used a Target Column with a Link Column property that's different from the Primary Linked Column in the table definition.
  • We've fixed a bug that was impacting write performance to tables on PostgreSQL with Data Change Notifications enabled.
  • We've fixed a "cell entitlements failed" error on Forms that would occur if a Form column contained a single quote in the column name.
  • We've fixed an issue on Forms where adding a [Created By] or [Modified By] field would return an error.
  • The /healthcheck no longer redirects to the initialization screen during a Cinchy startup, allowing you to properly hit the endpoint.