Our latest version is out officially, it has been available on secret download for a bit to those of you who asked for features so that you could test them out, but now it is official.
A few bugs fixed as always, and most likely some new ones added, but some of the features in this release are among the most requested.
Freezing columns for horizontal scroll
You can now right click a header and freeze the column so that it sticks on horizontal scroll.
All preceding columns get frozen too obviously, and if you unfreeze all succeeding column get unfrozen as well. This all sounds super complicated so if you open the Layout configuration dialogue, you’ll see a new column to set the Freeze option:
Column Alias
As you way have peeked from the previous screen shot, you can now rename columns in Layouts, using the Alias field. This was already partially possible using pivots but a bit of an overkill. Now you can rename any column.
Grouping Column Headers
There is a sneaky way to use the Alias to group column headers, simply by adding carriage return / new line (the Enter key). This will be interpreted as a second row of header for that column. If several consecutive columns have the same value for the same header level, they get merged automatically.
And to facilitate things with the grouping and carriage return headaches, you can select multiple columns in the Layout dialogue, right click and Group Headers by providing a grouping name.
Some more features that might be of interest:
Model Export supports missing / alternative mappings
Following a recent update to the Cross View Transfer that introduced optional Transformation (aggregation) to deal with multiple matches, and options to deal with missing and alternative mappings for the same target column (trust me that one came really handy when we received 800+ excel and csv sheets following 35 different templates with occasional typos), the same feature was requested to be added to the Model Property Transfer.
We took that opportunity for a little refresh of the dialogue look including a shortcut to the ID Match definition since that’s what this transfer use to match items.
The SQL queries for your actions, and the configuration of the updatable columns support parameters
We’ll end on a feature for the expert users of the SQL datasource, full parametrisation of the setup now allows you to target different databases, schemas, table or columns depending on Project or Viewer level parameters, so you can share the same configuration file but only swap a few parameters to target different environments.
Couple bugs have been fixed too, including the one in the drop down not validating in forms under some vodou conditions, this comes with a minor update on the form fields look to make input errors more visible, but we have a form overhaul update in the pipes.
Oh yeah also, we are compatible with Autodesk 2022 now. It’s about time almost halfway through 2021.
Stay tuned.