webag automat 6.4 - what is new?

Version management

The versions of a page can be compared more detailed. Prior to Automat 6.4 you could merely recognise that a complete paragraph has been changed. in the display of the changes between two versions that a whole paragraph had been changed.

Login alias

Users can define their own login alias names to log in using the alias instead of the username. The users benefit is that they can log in with a familar name, because often the username is a generated string.

Administrators can switch off the feature by setting the new global parameter LOGON_ALIAS_ALLOWED to "0".

User administration

The administrator can change the new login-alias for of a user - even if the use of aliases is switched off with LOGON_ALIAS_ALLOWED = 0. Thus you can first prepare a list of aliases before activating them.

The Automat now saves the user's last activity date and displays the date in the user administration.

The administrator can download a complete user-list with the columns username, full name. email-address, last activity date and user-id, formatted as an html-page or an Excel-spreadsheet.

Design-control with IF-clauses

With <AUTOMAT_TRIGGER>-XML-tags have been used to fade in/out parts of the source code in your html-triggers.Therefore you defined the attributes SHOW/HIDE="YES" together with one of the attributes MLC_LANG_CODE, CATEGORY_ID or CLASSIFICATION_ID. You could not use AUTOMAT_TRIGGER-tags in stencils, because therefore we recommended to create different stencils.

Now you can use AUTOMAT_TRIGGER-tags even in stencils. This reduces the number of required stencils and the stencil-code will be more compact.

The AUTOMAT_TRIGGER funcionality has been enhanced with the new "IF"-attribute. This attribute holds boolean expressions in PL/SQL-syntax, returning TRUE or FALSE. Example:

<AUTOMAT_TRIGGER SHOW="YES" IF="'$MLC_LANG_CODE'='de'">
(…)
</AUTOMAT_TRIGGER>

Explanation: The html-code tenclosed by the AUTOMAT_TRIGGER-tag is visible (SHOW=“YES“) when the IF-clause retures TRUE. Before parsing the IF-clause PL/SQL-code the Automat replaces the $-variables, so an english pages would get the IF-clause "en" = "de" which returns FALSE. The result is that the enclosed html-code will only be visible in german pages.

The most important benefit is the flexibility for software developers. You can write boolean PL/SQL-functions and uses them in your web-design. Example:

<AUTOMAT_TRIGGER SHOW="YES"
IF="is_important_page(i_text_id => '$TEXT_ID')">
(…)
</AUTOMAT_TRIGGER>

In this example your functions decides whether to fade in oder fade out the enclosed html-code. An ELSE-branch can easily be implemented using the PL/SQL-keyword NOT. Example:

<AUTOMAT_TRIGGER SHOW="YES"
IF="NOT (is_important_page(i_text_id => '$TEXT_ID'))">
(…)
</AUTOMAT_TRIGGER>

Restriction: You cannot wrap AUTOMAT_TRIGGER-Tags around stencil-input-areas (AUTOMAT_STENCIL-tags).

Event-triggers

With Event-triggers deveopers can enhance the Automat's functionality. You can write event-triggers to start before or after one of the pre-defined events. This Automat-release starts with tree trigger-types:

BEFORE_SESSION_START - fires on the day's first activity of a user, even if he did not have enter username and password because of a pemanent cookie-login. You can use this trigger-type to write your own tracking-functions.
BEFORE_PUBLISH_PAGE – fires before publishing a page. This is useful to implement your own check-routines.
AFTER_PUBLISH_PAGE – fires close after publishing a page. Useful to implement synchronous adaption code for your own datamodel.

Event-triggers are administered in the left navigation tree under "System / General / Event-triggers". An event-trigger is defines by entering a name and the PL/SQL-code. We recommen to enter just a PL/SQL-function call into the textarea and to implement the comprehensive functionality in your own package.

You can use the well-known $-variables within the trigger's PL/SQL-code like $WEB_ID, $TEXT_ID etc. As an exmple you can write an IF-clause that limits the trigger to fire only for a specific $WEB_ID.

There is no limitation on the number of triggers for an event-type. The fire in the order of their names, so use the names to control the order of your triggers.

System messages

You can now filter the system messages report with search patterns.

The new message „Session started by user ...“ tells you when a user has been started a session. Prior to Automat 6.4 you could not see the users activity when the user had a permanent cookie authorization.

Access statistics

There are new reports to print the requests per page grouped by month or by year.

The search engin crawler filters have been improved to eliminate crawler-requests from the statistics.

Further improvements

After entering username and password the "Successful logged in"-page is now focused on the "Next"-button. Thus you can resume by pressing the ENTER-key.
It is much easier to grant new authors. The author privileges Release pages for publication, Insert pages and sub-folders, Delete pages and sub-folders and Grant read privileges are now preset, so you do not have to activate each of these privilege-checkboxes. In addition the option Set assignment for all sub-folders is also preset.
Performance: The version management system has been speeded up. It now calculates the references between automat-pages much faster in systems with thousends of documents.
Design-administration: The textareas fpr entering the HTML-code in stencils and triggers now use the complete browser-window width for more convenient editing.

Resolved issues

The authoring system sitemap page no longer displays deleted pages from the watebasket.
You can now delete users having open online-forms. Their form-input is now deleted together with the user.
User administration: Entering an invalid value for ADMIN, ADMIN_USER or ADMIN_DESIGN does no longer let the edit-user form crash.
In some cases the webmaster could not grant authors but only the administrator.