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From Grunt to Gulp

Static image June 25, 2015 With the release of Agent 6, we hit a lot of milestones in our app. Agent became a true Single-page Application, we implemented a global Nav Menu that could be accessed anywhere, we upgraded the infrastructure to the latest version, and many more things. Along with this update, one goal we had was to rethink our frontend automation. At the time, we used a tool called Grunt. This is a node-based task runner. It allows you to define and run tasks that are often repeated in the development process such as compilations, optimizations, file copying, and others. Gulp is also a task automation tool but implemented differently with different objectives that we'll discuss later in this post. The Problem We saw that our gruntfile was getting out of control. It had grown to over 17 separate tasks with some configurations spanning…

What’s New in Dovetail Agent 6

June 24, 2015 This week we released Dovetail Agent version 6. Here’s a quick rundown of the major changes.   Faster all around We’ve improved performance throughout the application, both on the front and back-end. On the back-end, we’ve upgraded our major infrastructure components (including FUBU MVC, StructureMap, and Dovetail SDK), which improves the application startup time, as well as improves the time to process every request. We’ve also made improvements to the SQL generation module, which improves the performance of many database queries. In addition, queries are no longer executed on items without any relevant filters, which means fewer queries and better overall performance. On the front-end, Dovetail Agent is now a true SPA (Single Page Application), which means navigating through the application is much faster. There are less requests from the client to the server, and less data (scripts, templates, css,…

Debugging an IE 9 crash

June 23, 2015 Our Dovetail Agent app is supported on Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Since Chrome and Firefox auto-update, users are typically on the most current version. IE is a different story, which pretty much all of us in the tech community are well aware. Continuing to support older versions of IE is more and more difficult. But, we are sensitive to the challenges of upgrading IE in enterprise environments. For Dovetail Agent, we support IE 9, 10, and 11. IE 9 has its challenges for sure. Many organizations have stopped supporting older versions of IE, including Google.  And Microsoft recently announced that they were dropping support of older versions of IE. Barrett Sonntag (one of our developers here at Dovetail) has written a post outlining a recent challenge we ran into where IE9 would crash when dragging, scrolling, and updating styles.…

Troubleshooting a bad business rule

June 16, 2015 When Dovetail Rulemanager has a problem processing a business rule for some reason, it logs the problem. We can use these logs to help determine exactly what the problem is, and how to fix it. We’ll walk through an example on troubleshooting a specific issue. In this scenario, Rulemanager logged an error: 2015-06-12 10:23:07 [Consumer7] ERROR FChoice.RuleManager.OperandException - FChoice.RuleManager.OperandException: (-1) Invalid operand format for an IsIn operator. It looks like there was a problem with a rule condition that uses an IsIn operator. So how do we know which rule this is referring to? There may be hundreds of rules in the system. All of the needed information is contained in the log file. But since Rulemanager is a super busy application, and it’s multi-threaded, the logs contain a LOT of information. In a log file I recently received from…

Seek and ye shall find – the power of Search in Dovetail apps

June 12, 2015 A common fixture in our apps is the ubiquitous search box.  It’s available in Dovetail Agent, Dovetail Mobile, Dovetail Agent Lite, and Dovetail SelfService. It’s even available for the Clarify Classic Client.The heavy lifting for search is all handled on the back end by the Dovetail Seeker application. But the front-end is what users interact with, so we’ll cover that here.(BTW - If you’re looking for information on Dovetail Seeker, check out one of these posts, or review the docs.)On the surface, it’s pretty easy to use – put in some search terms and find what you’re looking for.  But there’s a lot more power available, and I wanted to touch on a few of these options.For the most part, I’ll cover search within Dovetail Agent, although much of this applies to all of our applications.What can we search for?Out…

File uploads in Dovetail Agent

June 9, 2015 Adding files to an item in Dovetail Agent is a pretty common activity. File attachments are supported on the following items: cases subcases solutions contracts site parts accounts We’ve made it super easy to add a file, which uploads it to the server and “attaches” it to the item. File attachments are stored in a common location on the server. Gone are the days of file attachments in the Clarify Classic Client where a file attachment resided on someone’s C drive, and couldn’t be accessed by anyone except the user who added the file attachment. Plus-One On each item, there’s a Files tab. Click on the tab, then click the + on the tab header. (From a development standpoint, we commonly refer to this as our plus-one pattern, where you click the plus sign to add one more related item)…

Closing a number of cases at once

June 5, 2015 Occasionally we get requests about closing a bunch of cases at once. Some people refer to it as a “mass case closing”, others use the term “batch case close”. Whatever you call it, it’s easy to do in Dovetail Agent. This request comes up when a bunch of test cases get created, or if a customer goes out of support, or a bad email loop creates cases by mistake, or a myriad of other reasons. Find the cases you want to close First step - create a query for the cases you want to close. I want open cases created in the last 365 days with the word “test” in the title. So, I created a query with 4 filters: Condition Starts with Open Item Type Is Equal To case Created within last (days) 365 Title Contains test Run the…

Site Part functionality in Dovetail Agent

June 2, 2015 Dovetail Agent includes functionality for maintaining your Site Parts (sometimes referred to as Installed Parts). Site Parts are parts that have actually been installed at a site. Users can install, de-install, re-install, and edit site parts. View Site Parts for a site On the site page, there is a Site Parts tab that shows all of the site parts that are installed at this site. Notice that site parts are shown hierarchically , as site parts can be installed under site parts. Also notice that the hierarchy shows Bins, which are containers for parts and for other bins. Bins are useful for organizing parts at a site. View De-installed site parts Clicking the Show De-Installed Parts checkbox will also show the parts that have been de-installed. This allows you to re-install a de-installed part. View a Site Part Clicking on…