Release Notes

Version 2.11.1 (2017-03-30)

Maintenance release

The release includes corrections to the following issues

• Resource picker for Analyser not working as intended.
• Edit mode for thing type dashboards sometimes not working as intended.
• Dashboards for newly connected Things requiring page reload to display auto-generated widgets.
• Stringified URL supplied by fn/invoke - GetSignedUrl sometimes stringified twice.

Version 2.11 (2017-03-02)

Features

Node-RED Integration

Node-RED is a powerful and flexible third party “tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services in new and interesting ways”. For further information, please visit https://nodered.org/.

To facilitate integration between Cloud Connect and Node-RED, Telenor Connexion is releasing Cloud Connect specific “nodes” that makes it easy to connect to, and interact with the Cloud API from within the Node-RED user interface.

Using Node-RED, flows that connect different API endpoints can be designed by drag and drop and then executed, to i.e. combine data from different sources with business logic functions and trigger activities in relevant systems.

Documentation for the Cloud Connect nodes can be found at https://docs.telenorconnexion.com/cc2/node-red/ once version 2.11 is in production and the “nodes” are provided by Telenor Connexion on request.

Geofencing

Geofencing is a powerful addition to the rule engine enabling quick and intuitive setup of location based rules to track your Things movements and get notifications/alarms.

To add a geofence-based rule, select the “latlng” resource in the Set rule section of rule editing. A map is shown in which you draw an area (polygon) by marking its corners, just as for geo-filtering. You are able to scroll in the map (move the covered map area) and also zoom in/zoom out in the map. This makes it easy to zoom in to mark a specific street or point as border for the geofence, yet at the same time enabling you to incorporate large areas in the fence.

4 geofence comparisons are available; Inside area, Outside area, Leaving area and Entering area.

The rule engine triggers events based on the incoming observation (latlng position) of the Thing. For the Leaving and Entering comparators, the incoming observation is compared with the last know state of the thing.

Per domain customizable user management notification emails

Emails sent for the signup, email verification, and administrator approval is now customizable per domain, enabling a tailored text message and web address depending on the user’s domain. This enables e.g. use of welcome message being relevant to the specific domain of the user and possible even different web addresses if the users are to be directed to different sites depending on domain.

Text and links have to be configured by Telenor.

Full support for multiple stacks in one AWS account

Apart from the production stack, customers and partners can now deploy multiple other stacks for use in the same AWS account set up for Cloud Connect. These can e.g. be used for testing, verification and demo without interfering with the live production stack.

Support for MQTT using Cognito credentials

Version 2.10 introduced the MQTT PUB/SUB API, which gave initial support for using Cognito credentials to subscribe and publish to MQTT.

In this version 2.11 we include support for the accepted, rejected, delta and documents sub topics and instead of using separate pub and sub topics, the same topic is used to replicate the structure of the $aws/things/<thingname>/shadow/update topics. A logged in Cognito user can subscribe and publish to thing-update/<domainpath>/<thingname> and subscribe to thing-update-accepted/<domainpath>/<thingname>, thing-update-rejected/<domainpath>/<thingname>, thing-update-delta/<domainpath>/<thingname> and thing-update-documents/<domainpath>/<thingname>. The payload is the same as for $aws/things/<thingname>/shadow/update.

App Board uses the MQTT PUB/SUB API

App Board is now migrated and uses the new MQTT PUB/SUB API.

Minor improvements and corrections

Numerous minor enhancements and bug fixes are delivered by the new release, including:

• Improved validation message handling
• Fixed issue with negative minimum values in gauge widget
• Fixed issue with Thing files browser pagination
• Fixed issue with LoRa
  • Thing creation intermittent
  • File widget not working as expected o Downlink not working as expected

Version 2.10 (2017-02-08)

Features

New implementation for the Thing Event API now includes publishing

The Thing Event API provides real time data to and from the MQTT broker, to and from users with appropriate permissions. This is the mechanism that allows e.g. “live” resource updates in dashboards (subscribing) and enables setting of resources from the Cloud API or App Board (publishing). In release 2.10, the underlying components for the publishing functionality and API have been replaced to improve efficiency and reliability.

Authenticated API clients now have a way of interacting directly with Things, i.e. subscribing or publishing to Thing topics, that are aware of the domain of the logged in user.

Clients of a specific Thing can subscribe to a topic of the form sub/domainPath/thingName, e.g. sub/domain1/domain2/my-thing, to receive new events as they occur in real time.

When a client wants to publish to the Thing is does so on a similar structure as the subscription topic, but the prefix will be pub instead, i.e. pub/domainPath/thingName. The Cloud API will only route messages published on this topic to the Thing if three criteria are met:

1. The payload is a state desired document: {"state": {"desired" : { ... }}}
2. The topic domain path exists in the domain tree
3. The domain of the Thing matches the domain path

The old implementation of Thing Event API with socket.io is considered deprecated and will be discontinued in coming releases (preliminary from version 2.13).

Topic Policies

The pub and sub topics are backed up by topic policies that reflect the domain structure of the domain tree and give privilege to interact with the topics. The domain path topic can have a maximum of 7 slashes (/). On login the correct topic policy is attached to the user.

The pub and sub topics together with the topic policies makes sure that only a user with the right privilege can access a topic and thus interact with the Thing.

Minor improvements and corrections

Numerous minor enhancements and bug fixes are delivered by the new release, including:

• Increased expiry time to 1 week for links sent via email when the user is created by an administrator.
• Enabled configuration of email texts sent by user management (sign up, recover password, etc) – these text can be configured by Telenor per instance.
• Fixed issue with browser caching resulting in users sometimes having problems logging in.
• Now validating so Domain ID only contains characters [a-zA-Z0-9_.,@/:#-]. The Domain Name can contain other characters too.
• Changes in domain tree structure. We now allow maximum 8 levels in the domain tree (root + 7 sub domains). Only 7 slashes (/) are allowed for the domain path in a MQTT topic, causing this limitation. In the domain path topic we now make “root” implicit: what used to be e.g. events/root/a/b/c/ now becomes events/a/b/c/. This allows for a domain tree of root + 7 sub domains.

Version 2.9 (2017-01-18)

Features

New implementation for the Thing Event API

The Thing Event API provides real time data from the MQTT broker to users with appropriate permissions. This is the mechanism that allows e.g. “live” resource updates in dashboards. In release 2.9, the underlying components for this functionality and API have been replaced to improve efficiency and reliability.

MQTT-based logging from the LoRa mediator

For developers of LoRa-based applications on Cloud Connect, a function that republishes the LoRa mediator’s log entries on a specific MQTT topic has been introduced. The logging messages are available to users of the mediator and will facilitate development and debugging of LoRa based applications.

Minor improvements and corrections

Numerous minor enhancements and bug fixes are delivered by the new release, including:

• Fixed issue with dashboards rendering without widgets before the first payload had been received (see item 5.3 below)
• The preview pane displayed when configuring the branding for a Cloud Connect instance is now centered.
• Domain ID, instead of domain label, was previously displayed in some parts of the user interface.
• Fixed issue with filtering in map-widget, where the filter was previously not correctly applied.
• Several updates for the LoRa mediator.

Version 2.8 (2016-12-14)

Features

New user account data and management

With release 2.8, Cloud Connect migrate to a new user management system, and functionality for password recovery, self-signup and more, as described below, will be added. Since user account passwords are encrypted, they cannot be migrated to the new infrastructure and need to be changed.

Hence, as part of the upgrade procedure, all users will receive an email message with instructions on how to update their password before being able to login again. It is therefore important that all users have a valid email address stored for their user account. We kindly ask you to verify the email addresses for your user(s) account(s) prior to the upgrade.

If you miss the mentioned email, please use the “Forgot password” functionality as described below to recover your password.

“Forgot password” functionality on login page

Functionality that allows a user to recover their password if it was forgotten is introduced. This function can be accessed from the login page, and given a valid user name, an email message with further instructions for how to reset the password will be sent to the email address specified for the user account. Triggering the “forgot password” functionality will not enforce a password change before the next login.

Reset password functionality in user settings

In user settings, the “change password” checkbox and fields has been replaced with a “Reset password” button. Pressing this button will trigger an email to the selected user with instructions on how to change their password. The reset password functionality will enforce a password change before the next login.

Enabled and disabled users

Since release 2.8, user accounts can be set to either an “enabled” or “disabled” state. Disabled users are not allowed to login, but are otherwise intact. This setting is accessible per user in the user settings table.

Validated self-sign up functionality

A self-sign up mechanism has been added to Cloud Connect. The sign up functionality is not turned on by default, but can be activated by Telenor Connexion upon request.

When activated, a “sign up” link will be available on the login screen. To register as a Cloud Connect user, a visitor on the login page can fill in his or her account details, and verify the provided email address.

When this step is completed, the new user account will be visible (but not yet activated) in user settings, where an existing user with read/write access to the root-domain can activate the account by assigning a domain and a role to it.

The signup, email verification, and administrator approval through domain and role assignment is supported by email notifications sent as applicable to the new user and to existing Cloud Connect users with read/write access to the root domain.

Minor improvements and corrections

Numerous minor enhancements and bug fixes are delivered by the new release, including:

• Several improvements and corrections in the “Analyze” resource selector and graph
• Improved forms for widget configuration
• Added a content type header ("Content-type": "application/json") to webhook requests
• Improved resizing/scaling of images uploaded in the Thing Summary
• Improved behavior for “real-time” updates of search results while entering a filter criteria

Known issues

When a new thing type is created and populated with things and observation data, the thing dashboard remains empty by default. To create an auto generated dashboard with widgets for all available resources, please use the “Reset the current dashboard to the current resources” button, available in dashboard edit mode.