Release Notes

Version 2.7 (2016-11-30)

Features

LoRaWAN support

We have added support for LoRaWAN by adding a LoRa Mediator. This allows users of Cloud Connect to provision and communicate with LoRa devices in a seamless way, driven by Cloud Connect App Board and APIs.

Through the App Board (or the Cloud API) a user can manage the LoRaWAN including signup of users, application and mote provisioning, encoder functions, dashboards, rule configuration, analytics, etc.

The LoRa Mediator acts as a bridge between a LoRaWAN network and the Cloud Connect MQTT broker. It enables bi-directional messaging between a mote and Cloud Connect.

• LoRa application IDs are mapped to Cloud Connect Thing Types
• LoRa motes are mapped to Cloud Connect Things

Since version 2.6, Cloud Connect supports script field type for Thing Types. This is used for payload encoding, i.e. translating the LoRaWAN byte buffers <=> JSON documents that can be interpreted automatically by Cloud Connect giving a seamless experience visualizing the sensor data in dashboards widgets.

Analyze improvements

Saving an analysis is now done to the current user profile, meaning it can be picked up on any other screen. Typical use case is a user creating the analysis on the PC and later wants to pick it up while in the field with a tablet or a large screen phone.

The saved analyses are found in the My Analyses list. Editing an existing analysis and then saving it again with the same name overwrites the old analysis. Saving with a new name creates a copy.

Other improvements to the My Analyses list

• Possible to sort on the columns Name and Date Modified (with arrows indicating direction)
• Pagination
• Search for Analysis by name

Minor improvements and corrections

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

• Fixed issue with count not being reset for a Rule when Rule is updated.
• Fixed issue with a newly created widget under certain conditions not being saved to the View Mode
• Fixed issue with Branding preview not working fully in IE 11

Version 2.6 (2016-11-09)

Features

Thing Summary

The Thing bar at the top in Thing Dashboard has been made expandable/collapsible. Once expanded, extensive information about the Thing is displayed. The information includes Thing Name, Domain, Description, but also Telenor Connexion “convention” information reported from the Thing is displayed if available: IP Address, SIM Card IMSI Number, IMEI Number, ICC ID Number and Firmware version. At the bottom of the summary, time and date for when the Thing was last heard from is displayed together with the date when the Thing was created.

A picture of the Thing can also be displayed if uploaded by the user – for example, a picture of this specific Thing in use/action can be taken and uploaded instantly from the mobile phone.

The Thing Summary is automatically populated with known information and not editable in terms of content (except for the Picture, Thing Name and Thing Description). The summary is always available on the Thing Dashboard, regardless of View Mode.

User Management enhancements

The user management section has been enhanced. The list now contains 2 more columns: email and role. Capabilities added include search on user name, domain and email, sorting on any column, pagination if more than 10 users and multiple delete of users.

Script field type for Thing Type custom fields

In addition to the existing text and number field types, script field type is now added. With the script field type we enable input of snippets of program code, targeting for example advanced encoding functions for sensor data reported from Things.

Other powerful use cases involve storing snippets of code per thing type that are executed as part of external workflows, such as web-hook receivers. Although the “text” field type could be used for storing such snippets, editing code in the small text field is rather cumbersome. The new script type improves the user experience by activating a larger input field and editing capabilities typically found in IDE’s (“integrated development environment”) such as syntax highlighting and automatic indentation.

Minor improvements and corrections

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

• Forms in App Board has been improved in terms of performance, especially when editing form data
• Pie charts now clearly state start and end of each interval
• Branding – Improved user experience when editing the login page text fields
• Analysis exports now has support for Sub-things and UTC time, and the file name is more informative
• Checkboxes/legend in Analyze now use more colors to improve readability
• Fixed issue when deleting a Sub-thing
• Fixed issue with time stamp Last Updated on both Thing Dashboard and Sub-thing Dashboard
• Fixed issue with very long numbers not being fully displayed in value widgets
• Fixed issue with New Events counter in top menu not being cleared under certain conditions
• Fixed issue with Event widget not displaying any Events under certain conditions
• Fixed issue with displaying of data for Sub-things in time series and table widgets

Version 2.5 (2016-10-26)

Features

All Things Dashboard

The All Things List View has evolved into the All Things Dashboard, giving you a Dashboard overview with all your things in one view, regardless of Thing Type. The Dashboard has four widgets; Map, List, Events and Credentials. The dashboard can be edited in terms of placement and size of widgets. Once saved it is stored to the user profile to ensure consistent experience between sessions.

All filtering and sorting capabilities are available and moreover you can sort and filter based on Thing Type. This view is the start page when you log into the App Board and is always reached by clicking the logo in upper left corner.

Geo-filter

The geo-filter is a powerful tool that enables quick and intuitive filtering using a map. To add a geo- filter, select “Location” in the filter section and draw an area (polygon) by marking its corners. The filter is applied once the area is completed (closed area) and it will return all things in the marked area.

While marking the area, 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 filter, yet at the same time enabling you to incorporate large areas in the geo-filter.

Geo-filter is not applied to the Thing Credentials widget.

Thing Type custom fields

Functionality to define a bespoke set of custom fields (meta data) for Thing Types and edit this data for individual Thing Types has been added. At this stage, the custom fields need to be defined by Telenor Connexion, but in later releases we will add support in App Board for this.

Typical use case is to add additional description, capacities, etc for the Thing Type.

Customizable widget with dynamic content

The dynamic widget type gives you the power to design your own widgets for the Thing Dashboard.

Using “markdown”-language (similar to HTML), you can combine text with resource data and meta- data and apply formatting to e.g. display values in a table. When editing a dynamic widget, an instant preview is displayed to simplify the design work.

Support for Life Cycle Events

Life Cycle Events are special MQTT events created by Cloud Connect when selected domain objects are created, updated or deleted. A common use case for Life Cycle Events is to trigger functionality or workflows in external systems when information managed by Cloud Connect is modified.

Please note that Life Cycle events are currently only implemented for Thing, Thing Type and Thing Batch (create only).

Major improvements in Observations indexing

A major upgrade and improvement of how Observations are indexed has been implemented. This improves flexibility for resource names and the corresponding indexes and gives a better user experience for use cases related to observation data.

Minor improvements and corrections

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

• Responsiveness for Phones/Tablets: When using a small screen, a new side bar menu replaces the top menu. In the mobile menu, the user profile is placed under Settings. In All Events page you can now filter on all Events that needs acknowledgement
• Sorting of Things in Thing list is now case insensitive
• Sorting of Domains in Domain list is now case insensitive
• Filtering is now case insensitive
• All sortable table columns now have icons indicating the direction of sorting in the table
• By default the following widgets are added to the Thing Type Dashboard: Map, Events, Thing Credentials

Version 2.4 (2016-09-28)

Features

All Things List View

This list gives you all your things in one view, regardless of Thing Type. In addition to the normal sorting and filtering capabilities, you can sort and filter this list based on Thing Type.

This view is the start page when you log into the App Board and is always reached by clicking the logo in upper left corner.

Analyze

Analyze, found in the top menu, is a powerful tool for analyzing sensor data from your Things. You can compare any sensor data, both multiple resources from the same Thing and from different things. This allows comparison of e.g. input power and output power for an engine with the same data for one or more other engines.

To get started, just select the resources for the Things you want to analyze and they show up color coded in the Analyze chart, as bar or line chart as you select. Unchecking the resource checkboxes enables you to filter and focus on the observations you really want to understand.

By default a week’s data is analyzed ending at current time. With the observation picker you adjust start and end time and the zoom-and-move capability within the chart allows you to focus on specific time periods and observations to better understand behavior and/or abnormalities.

The granularity of the data presented is related to the selected time spam and dynamically adjusted to fit the chart nicely.

You can analyze many resources simultaneously, but the user experience is best for up to about 20 resources.

You can name and save your analysis, enabling you to get back later and do the same analysis again. All saved analyses are found in a list below the chart.

The data points of the current visualization/analysis can be exported to a .csv-file to be treated in other systems or programs.

Observation Period Picker

Major improvements are done to facilitate intuitive and fast selection of time periods, including:

• Selection of date and time (hours and minutes) in the same pop-up, for both Start and End time
• Quick button to select current time as End time
• Default duration the first time in the session (before any changes are done): Start time is 00:00 seven days back and End time is current time
• The selected time interval persists during the session in the complete App Board, meaning it will stay the same when you navigate around in App Board, until you log out

Filter

We have added powerful capabilities to the Filter

• Filtering on payload (sensor data) values and support for three operators: greater than, less than and equals. This enables you to filter e.g. “Show all things where the power is less than 500 watts” or “Show all houses where the temperature is above 25 degrees”
• Filtering on Thing status, enabling you to e.g. filter out all Things that is online
• You can add multiple filters
• When collapsed, the Filter bar shows what filters are applied, if any
• When collapsed, there is a quick button to clear all filters

The Filter is present in more views

• Filter is now available in the Thing Type Overview in addition to the List view, meaning it applies to all widgets in the Overview. Today these are Map, Histogram, Events and Credentials

Every Thing Type has a separate persistence of the filter, i.e. the Filter selections are unique to the Thing Type. The Filter now persists during the session (until log out) under these conditions

• Navigating within the same Thing Type (List/Overview)
• Navigating to Thing Dashboard and then back to Thing Type level
• Navigating away from this specific Thing Type and then coming back (from e.g. Settings, other Thing Types, Profile)
• When navigating from one Thing Type to another Thing Type, the filter shall change to the persisted filter for the Thing Type you navigate to (or cleared filter, if no filter has been applied)

Rules additions

User interface editing a Rule is improved and simplified

• Flow is improved and clearer stating what you need to do
• Choosing trigger Rule “once” makes Needs acknowledgement mandatory
• Summary of the Rule is improved in readability
• You can now navigate between the different steps by clicking the step banner
• In the default Event message we have added the Rule Name.
• To facilitate easier customization of Event message, a help section is added on the message information syntax.
• Fields for Email and Webhook are larger and expanding as you write

Events additions

Top menu Events display now shows two numbers representing:

1. Events that needs acknowledgement – These Events are shown until acknowledged by any user in the system
2. All other new Events – These Events are reset as soon as they are viewed, e.g. by opening the pop-up.

The corresponding pop-up now has separate sections. In the upper half, up to 10 Events that needs acknowledgement are shown. Below, up to 10 other new Events are shown.

Thing API – Backdating Observations in two ways

Backdating an observation means, you send it from the Thing to the cloud some time after it has happened and therefore would like to include the time stamp when the observation happened.

We have added a second alternative to backdate observations when sending them to the cloud, Standard flow backdating:

• You can now send backdated observations using the normal topic for observations in the Thing API. You just add the time stamp and send it like any other observation. The time stamp will be taken as the time of the observation.
• If time stamp is not included, time is set when the observation arrives at the cloud (the Thing Shadow) – this is the normal behavior when not backdating.

The typical use case is a Thing that buffers observations in sequence, either because the Thing only connects to cloud periodically (every hour or every day) or when the connection to cloud is lost. When the Thing connects/re-connects, it sends the buffered data in sequence to the cloud (First-in- First-out).

Standard flow backdating shall only be used when observations are sent in sequence as it has some features that you need to be aware of

• The observations passes the Rules engine, therefore Rules are triggered
• The last backdated observation sent will be considered as the current observation until a new observation arrives, and the Thing meta-data “Last updated” will be set to the time of the last reception of an observation, not the time stamp sent with the last received observation.

Since version 2.2 we have Batch flow backdating, which applies to use cases when you don ́t want to trigger Rules and/or you don ́t want to update Thing Shadow, but only add historical observations:

• Observations are sent with time stamps in batch to a specific “backdate” topic of the Thing
• The observations does not need to be sent in sequence and are treated and stored as historical observations, but does not update Thing Shadow, nor trigger Rules.

Minor improvements and corrections

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

• Responsiveness for Phones/Tablets: Top menu and tables improvements
• Context sensitive widget edits, to ensure you always get relevant edit options depending on choice of widget type
• Creating a new widget always places the widget on top and opens the edit widget dialog
• When selecting a Thing Type, the page displayed now is the Overview instead of the List view
• +WIDGETS and +THINGS buttons are moved to the far right in the App Board
• Thing Name is shown on top of the Thing Dashboard page instead of Thing ID
• The wording “Thing ID” is replaced with “Thing Name” in the complete App Board
• Pop-up message when a created thing batch is completed is removed. Instead an Event notification is created when finished
• Fixed issue with Last updated timestamp in widgets, where the timestamp under certain conditions could be “inherited” by other widgets
• Fixed issue with indenting domains in domains list
• Fixed issue with Thing Types being editable in sub-domains when not supposed to

Version 2.3 (2016-08-25)

Features

Events page

Events page where all existing events can be viewed by classification is now available. You get to this page by clicking “Show all” on any events widget.

Events can be filtered by time and if applicable for the specific event, it can be acknowledged when action is taken.

In addition, Events widgets can be added both in Thing Type Overview and in Thing Overview.

Improved Things filtering

The Things filter has been improved with the following capabilities

• Filtering on multiple domains
• Add multiple filter records
• Filter is saved/persisted per Thing Type, i.e. if you do a filtering on Thing Type A, then go to Thing Type B and do another filtering, when you come back to Thing Type A the filtering set for A is used.

Observation API improvement

The Find Observation API is improved to handle unlimited number of things and larger timespans.

Unless you use term queries in your query, everything will work the same way as it did before. If you use a term query to filter based on domain (as described in the API documentation), you need to change the type from inventory to thing_mapping.

Thing Types becomes domain sensitive

Thing Types are now connected to domains, meaning that you specify a domain when creating the Thing Type. This enables the Thing Type to be used in that domain and all sub domains, but also enables “hiding” of Thing Types for parallel domains (and their respective sub domains).

Browser support

In this release we have improved the user experience for browsers in general, and especially for Internet Explorer 11. This means it is now possible to use later versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer and MS Edge.

Recommended browsers are still later version of Chrome & Safari, they give the best user experience.

Minor improvements and corrections

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

• Improved styling and sorting of lists in Settings section
• Consistent sorting of domain tree
• Progress indicator is now displayed when a list is loading
• Back button added in Thing Overview page
• Observation period picker has been improved on usability and design
• Consistent look and feel for maps in different widgets
• General usability and user interface improvements
• Upgraded React to version 15.0
• Increased test coverage of automated tests
• Fixed issue with Thing index becoming out of sync with Thing shadow under certain circumstances
• Fixed issue with saving a widget position when using a small screen (< 1050 pixels)
• Fixed issue with updating of domains
• Fixed issue with domain information not being displayed in widgets