Saltcorn 0.1.3 - plugin and UX improvements

By Tom Nielsen
Published on 

Saltcorn 0.1.3 contains changes related to plug-ins and a ton of UX improvements, bug fixes, and error message improvements

  •  Configurable plug-ins: plug-ins can now have their own configuration, which can configure or influence the datatypes, layouts or functionality they provide. A new layout plug-in, any-bootstrap-theme uses this to great effect by letting the user select from several stylesheets or providing their own Bootstrap 4 stylesheet by a URL. The Nav bar colour and appearance can also be configured.
  • Login screen configurable by layout plug-in. Theme plug-ins can now determine how login and signup screens appear. The screens now have significantly improved appearance, and this can be further configured by the plug-in configuration.
  • Docker images: Docker images are now available, see the Wiki page on Docker
  • View links can set label, or use join field. When linking to a view from another view, you can now specify the label to use. For views to parent tables, the summary field is used as the view label if no view label is specified. For instance, take the classical example of a database of employees. A view of an employee might have a link to a view of the manager. Using the summary field as the label, that is the link text, to view the manager allows you to have the name of the manager as the link text instead of just a generic label like "Manager".
  • Implement field updates. Changes to some field attributes (field type, unique and required) would previously be ignored or could cause errors, at times in in predictable parts of the application. Now, changes that can be implemented are now implemented and changes that cannot be implemented have been disabled. 
  • Stand-alone field views in plug-ins: a plug-in can now define field views separately from types, so a plug-in can provide new field views for types that are defined in different plug-ins.
  • Plug-in dependencies: plug-ins can now state that they require other plug-ins to be installed. Dependency resolution is done without bounds on version numbers.
  • UX improvements: stop installing incompatible packs, root pages chosen on the page configuration, form sections, view permissions determined by role rather than a generic public versus not public, step names and step number in workflows, breadcrumbs.
  • Bug fixes. Many bugs fixed. Some were discovered by users on Saltcorn.com - in particular would like to thank the person who created a field with the name "group", which is a reserved SQL keyword caused a couple of issues. Some bugs were discovered as we push towards 100% test coverage and coverage of code by contracts.
  • Specific error messages. In several places, if the user performed an action that was technically incorrect they would only receive a generic error message from an application crash. Many of these have now turned into sensible error feedback to the user.

If you want to try it out, head over to Saltcorn.com which offers free hosting for evaluation


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