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5.6 Release notes

UI rebuild

E
Written by Erkka Honkavaara
Updated over a week ago

What has changed

Breaking changes in 5.6 release

Note: These changes were already present in 5.5 and are listed here for visibility

Service Bus for Windows (for pre 5.5 installations)
Support for Service Bus for Windows Server is removed, when updating to 5.5+ switching to RabbitMQ for full on-premise deployments is mandatory. This also means that using the Service Bus Trigger no longer works with Service Bus for Windows Server.


​Remote Subprocesses (for pre 5.5 installations)

Because of changes to the message busses used by Frends, Agent groups within an Environment should be reinstalled at the same time. This is required when Remote Subprocesses are being used.


​Frends.Tasks.Attributes support to be removed

Frends Tasks Attributes was a way of modifying the Parameter editor for Tasks before Frends 4.5.6, when it was deprecated and support for it was removed in 5.5.3. Previously imported Tasks will continue to work normally, but new Task imports will require migration to System.ComponentModel.Annotation to support conditional parameter displays etc.

SQL Server requirements

The minimum supported version of SQL Server is now MS SQL Server 2017 for on-premise deployments.

5.6.5

23rd of November 2023

UI

Improvements

  • Process compilation speeds improved by improving caching and trimming NuGet package dependency restorations for .NET Framework Processes. This affect subsequent builds after the first build of a Process. Cross-platform Process builds (.NET Standard and .NET) are also sped up and will be further improved in the 5.7 release to match Framework compilation speeds.

  • Process Instance list view now always shows the execution time range filters, so it's possible to modify if there aren't initially any Instances to show

5.6.4

10th of November 2023

UI

Improvements

  • Example Processes for new Trials are now updated to .NET 6 Processes and Tasks

Bug fixes

  • Fixed issue with Triggers being shown as red due to Agent being shown incorrectly offline intermittently

  • DenyTags access rule no longer prevents viewing the Process list when there's over 2100 Processes

  • Fixed issue with filtering Process and Subprocess list by Subprocess

  • Fixed issue with opening Process actions menu in the Process list page not opening or closing instantly when clicked before the page has fully finished loading

Agent

Bug fixes

  • Linux Cross-platform Agent installation script now creates the log directory and assigns the service user correct access rights

5.6.3

25th of September 2023

Agent

Improvements

  • Added official support for Managed identity authentication for Service Bus Trigger

Bug fixes

  • Fixed Cross-platform Agent installer notification for ports not being opened in Windows firewall

  • Fixed rebuilding Processes with a Global error handler targeting a Remote Subprocess

  • Fixed importing Processes with a Global error handler

  • Fixed issue with Process execution duration not showing the duration correctly for executions that took longer than one hour

  • Fixed issue with rolling back API spec versions

5.6.2

17th of August 2023

UI/Log service

Improvements

  • Added opt-in support for RabbitMQ Quorum queues

  • It is now possible to delete old Process versions

  • It is now possible to select the visible columns in the Process instance list again

  • It is now possible to filter the Task list with "Show only updatable" to show only Tasks that have available updates

  • It is now possible to filter the Process list with Trigger type

  • Process instance list has a new field indicating if it has logged steps

  • Instead of showing "No instances" the Process instance list now shows instances from the latest execution, e.g. the last 7 days that had executions when there's initially no executions during the last 7 days

  • Remote Subprocess target Agent group is now possible to be chosen dynamically

  • Process variables are now deployment specific

  • Process list pagination is now handled server-side which improves the performance

  • Changing filters on the Process instance list and Process list are no longer pushed to the page history on the browser, so clicking back will take you to the previous page instead of modifying the filters

  • Page loads times and performance improved, especially for the API Management

  • Improved Process instance count update processing speed

  • Updated to Microsoft.Data.Sql to allow using newer Azure authentication models, such as Managed identities

  • UI tweaks, fixes and performance improvements
    ​

Bug fixes

  • Fixed issue with Process instance list when Promoted variable name contains a dot

  • Fixed issue with Monaco editor's autocompletion when there's multiple fields

  • When importing Environment variables the Description field is now updated as well

  • Disabled changing fields that should not be editable for API Triggers in the Trigger shape

  • On the Process instance list fixed the time filter from being modified when using the search functionality

  • Copying Triggers and exclusive decision shapes now correctly copies fields when there is a naming collision

  • Fixed editing OAuthProvider's WellKnownMetadataLocationOverride to not cause an error

  • Corrected access rights for getting feedback URL from the backend

  • Improved database cleanups to prevent cleanups from being timing out

  • Fixed Process execution counts not updating correctly

  • Fixed issue with Agent group dropdown not being populated in Process instance list

  • Log service now processes heartbeats that have been sent at the exact same time

  • Fixed issue when filtering by tags that contained illegal characters

  • Fixed compiling cross-platform Processes where the element name contained a double quote

  • Log service now reads Agent heartbeats in batches which prevents heartbeats from being queued up causing Agents to seem to be offline eventhough they are online

  • Limited Agent configuration option is now correctly included in the Cross-platform Agent configuration

Agent

Improvements

  • Updated to Microsoft.Data.Sql to allow using newer Azure authentication models, such as Managed identities

  • Cross-platform installer now reminds about opening firewall ports when installing the Agent with HTTP(s) ports configured and Windows firewall is in use

Bug fixes

  • Agent SQLite database locked when running multiple File triggers fixed

  • Fixed problem with Trigger HTTP endpoint not being accessible if there were routes with overlapping route parameters being used

  • Cross-platform Gateway Agent now correctly recovers from target Agents being temporarily unreachable

    • Note: When the HealthCheckApiKey needs to unset on the target Agents and provided to the Cross-platform Gateway Agent so that the Gateway can access the health check endpoint

5.6.1

30th of March 2023

UI


Improvements

  • Process list can now be exported as a CSV-file

  • Task execution retry count is now shown in the Process instance view

  • HSTS is now enforced for Cloud tenants

  • Added OpenAPI specification file import endpoint in Management API

  • Support for disposing in Foreach-iterator

  • Agent warnings are aggregated and shown on the Agent Group view

  • The default save option for new Processes in the Process editor is "Create new Process" instead of "Create and activate"


Bug fixes

  • Processes can be filtered by used Tasks (like before)

  • Promoted result search no longer causes an error

  • Fixed issue with page loading on Safari

  • Default role can now be emptied for an OpenId provider

  • Fixed Process validation to correctly check for Environment variable references when editing Triggers

  • Process import no longer breaks scandic letters' encoding

  • Fixed creating a new Environment Variable group and value from the Process Editor

  • Fixed not being able to select a replacement Task for a freshly imported Process in the Process editor

  • Fixed copy&paste between Process editor tabs

  • Fixed Process instance running count being displayed wrongly during race condition with count refreshes

  • Many smaller fixes related the to UI remake

Agent


Improvements

  • Service bus client uses message's lockedUntil to determine message log renewal interval

  • Fixed auto-connect for Agents when using RabbitMQ as the messagebus

Bug fixes

  • HTTP and API Trigger now ignore (and warn) when an invalid content type is provided for a request

  • Fixed a concurrency issue with RabbitMQ message processing which affected Remote Subprocesses (when using RabbitMQ as the system bus) and Rabbit Trigger

  • Queue Trigger now allows multiple connections to the the same ActiveMQ broker

5.6.0

19th of January 2023

UI

The management UI has been rebuilt to provide a more modern and usable user experience. The different pages of the UI have a more uniform way of functioning, making it easier for new users to jump in.

Notable changes, improvements and features:

  • Dark mode

  • Process auto-recovery functionality to allow continuing development if the browser crashes

  • A new Welcome page for new Frends deployments to help new users to start using the product with links to documentation and interactive product tours

  • From now on it is only possible to create Group Environment Variables on the Root level, i.e. new text, number, secret type Environment Variables can only be created inside of Groups. This was done to guide towards more cleaner maintainable Environment Variable structures

  • Monitoring rules can now be deployed/copied to new Environments as inactive

  • Process editor now has a buttons to center back to BPMN graph and see keyboard shortcuts

  • It is now possible to use expressions for Shared state Time-To-Live

  • Ctrl+S now does a 'Save as draft' in the Process Editor

  • New Agent groups will be Cross-platform by default

  • It is now possible to specify variables to be disposed at the end of a scope

  • When importing a Process that has an API Trigger, it is now automatically linked to an existing API Specification that matches it

  • It is now possible to disable Caller cancellation, i.e. this will allow a Process to finish even if the HTTP request which started the Process is cancelled

  • It is now possible to enforce mandatory Process change descriptions

Bug fixes

  • Fixed Process instance being reported for the wrong time when the Process started and ended on different dates

  • Fixed failing validation when switching Process' target framework to .NET 6 from .NET Standard

  • Process diff view now correctly highlights array parameter changes

New feature - Process Variables

Processes can now specify Process Variables. Process Variables are initialized at the start of the execution of a Process and can be accessed through the #var-reference. This feature will support the upcoming improved templating functionality by allowing the change of parameters during import. They will also allow changing the parameter values that use Process Variables without recompiling in the future.

Agent

Improvements and new features

  • The Agent will execute Remote Subprocesses through the local interface instead of going through the Remote Subprocess pipeline when the target Agent group is the one executing the parent Process

Bug fixes

  • Agents now report a failed Process instance execution if they cannot execute a Manual Trigger due to a missing Environment Variable

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