Saltcorn 1.1.1 is now available. Since we didn't write a blog post for 1.1.0 this post will cover what's new in both releases, that is, since 1.0.

First some meta-announcements:

1.1.1 and 1.1.0 are both development releases. That means they both have more experimental features and a higher expected defect rate then from a stable release. If stability is essential for you you should wait until the next stable release which will be 1.2.0. we are following an odd unstable slash even stable versioning scheme like the early Linux kernels.

Secondly there is now a changelog in the GitHub repository, which is also available in a  "what's new" link under the system settings inside Saltcorn apps. That means you can stop reading these blog posts and see what is new from right inside the app!

Here are the major new changes 1.1.1 and 1.1.0:

Workflows: workflows are a new type of action which are much more powerful than the old multi-step action. Like multi-step actions they allow you to run one elementary action after another. But in contrast to simple multi-step actions,

•  workflows allow you to pass information between steps by reading and writing to a context;
• workflows can be suspended to wait for user input or for a duration;
• control flow is much easier with workflows; and workflows have durable execution so if they crash they can resume from the last successfully completed step,
• and error handling can be defined within the workflow by setting an error handling step.

A workflow that asks for user input, and depending on the input, does a web request or runs a for loop with structured data output at the end

Workflows can be run offline for instance triggered periodically, or can be run interactively from a button click, or there is a possibility to run a workflow in a new view type (WorkflowRoom) for a chatbot like interaction between the user and a workflow.

Mobile builder: the mobile app (Android and iOS) builder is now using Capacitor which is more modern, better maintained and has a larger community than Apache Cordova. Android, iOS apps and PWA sites can also now register for sharing content (so users can share e.g. a link from another app to a Saltcorn app). 

Animations in the builder. The container tab in the buildup now has a section for animations. You can choose a animation and apply it with a delay and with and with a set duration. All animations are triggered as they scroll into view

Letsencrypt certificates can now be acquired for tenants.

Stored calculated fields that contain join fields expression are now automatically updated if the value in the dependent table changes. This means that you can now remove almost all recalculate_stored_fields actions from triggers as they are no longer necessary.

Developer accounts: you can now give permission to roles below admin to edit views tables pages and triggers.

Full text search improvements:

• A full text search index can now be created which dramatically improved the search speed if you have large tables
• A pop-up with search syntax appears if your database supports the web search syntax (PostgreSQL 11+).
• Results can be shown in tabs.
• Search rules are localized according to the default locale (a new option on site identity settings).

Allocate new row in edit views (forms): there is now an option in edit views to allocate a new row (create the row in the table) if the edit view is loaded without a specified row from the state. This solves a problem that previously caused a lot of headache with edit views. In some forms you would typically want to include information about relations to that row, for instance when creating many to many associations with the select2 or badges plugins, or by embedding views of related rows. This was not previously possible if a row did not already exist and often we would end up splitting the form into two different pages. Now a row can be allocated on loading the view so the appropriate relations already exist. Another option allows you to delete these allocated rows if no changes to the form have been made.

Going forward this includes all the major new features that we would like to see in Saltcorn 1.2 which is the next stable release scheduled for this spring. The remainder of this development cycle will consist of dependency upgrades bug fixes and small usability improvements. There will however be some very exciting new plugin modules being developed at the same time.