Release Notes for XWiki 4.3

Version 3.1 by Vincent Massol on 2012/11/22
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This is the release notes for XWiki Platform, XWiki Enterprise and XWiki Enterprise Manager. They share the same release notes as they are released together and have the same version.

This release brings several improvements in Workspaces, Extension Manager, Distribution Wizard, the REST API, new field pickers (Date, User and Groups), improved translation registration and new experimental Solr search.

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki 4.2)

Default date picker

The date picker from AppWithinMinutes is now the default picker for all XClass properties of type Date. This means that you'll get a date picker when editing an object with a Date property even if you didn't use AppWithinMinutes to create the XClass.

DatePicker.png

If for some reason you don't want to use the new date picker then you can edit the XClass and uncheck "Use Date Picker" for the Date property.

User and Group picker

We added a user and group picker that is used by default for all XClass properties of type "List of Users" and "List of Groups". When multiple selection is enabled, each selected user is added to the list above the picker. You can remove individual users from the list of selected users or you can clear the entire list.

userPicker-editMultiple.png

In single selection mode whenever you select an user it overwrites the previously selected user.

userPicker-editSingle-objectEditor.png

The list of selected users is displayed in view mode in a similar way. For each user there is a link to their profile page.

userPicker-viewMultiple.png

The group picker behaves in the same way. The group alias is the name of the group document, the group name is the title of the group document while the group avatar is the first image attached to the group document.

groupPicker-editMultiple.png

The user and group picker can be configured to display a scope toggle that can be used to switch between local and global user/group suggestions.

userPicker-scope.png

You can check this if you edit a group from a subwiki (in a multiwiki environment).

groupSheet-edit.png

Workspace Templates

Similar to what admins were doing with the Wiki Manager Application, we noticed the need for the Workspace Application to allow users to choose what type of workspace they want to create.

workspaceTemplates.png

Please see the current workaround for creating workspace templates (as admin) until an easy UI becomes available.

Experimental Solr based search engine

A new and experimental search engine based on Apache Solr is now available.

The new search UI offers advanced search features and results highlighting. Future versions will also include Faceted Search.

solrSearchFilters.png

The new engine has it's own index, separate from the Lucene one, which is stored by default in the <permanent directory>/solr folder. In the same folder you can also access Solr's configuration files together with the index's schema.xml which you can tweak to achieve better results. To change this folder's location, you can either pass the -Dsolr.solr.home system property when you start the application container (tomcat/jetty/etc.) or you can set the search.solr.home property in WEB-INF/xwiki.preferences.

For now, indexing is done only manually by using the Search Administration UI. Because of this, in order to get any search results, you have to go to Administration > Applications > Search and index/reindex the wiki. Any changes in the content of the wiki will not be searchable until you manually reindex. This limitation will be removed in future versions, once the feature matures.

solrSearchAdmin.png

This new search engine is not enable by default, since Lucene is still the default one, but, if you wish to try it out, it can be enable by going to Administration > Applications > Search > Search engine to use and selecting Solr (Experimental).

Extension Manager improvements

If you're migrating from a pre XWiki 4.2 version to XWiki 4.3 you'll notice that the new Applications Panels is not visible by default. This is caused by this issue which will be fixed in XWiki 4.4. More specifically the XWiki Object Property for the Panels list in XWiki.XWikiPreferences isn't merged properly and your old value is kept. You thus need to manually go the the Administration and add the Panels.Applications name to the Panels list.

UI

When you click on "Show details" to get more information about an extension, the extension manager tries to resolve all the dependencies of that extension by making requests to the configured remote extension repositories. These requests slow down considerably the time needed to display the extension details. We fixed this by resolving only the local dependencies at first and then making consecutive AJAX requests to resolve the remote dependencies.

EM-AsyncDependencyLoading.png

The install and uninstall plan is now progressively displayed while it is being created. This is especially useful for the Distribution Wizard since you don't have to wait anymore for the install plan to be created without getting any feedback about its progress.

EM-liveInstallPlan.png

As you can see in the previous image, we also limited the height of the progress tab and the extension job log is automatically scrolled to the end while the job is running.

Private repositories

Maven and XWiki repositories now support authentication. You can indicate a user and a password in xwiki.properties file the following way:

extension.repositories=privatemavenid:maven:http://host.com/private/maven/
extension.repositories.privatemavenid.auth.user=someuser
extension.repositories.privatemavenid.auth.user=password

extension.repositories=extensions.xwiki.org:xwiki:http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/rest/
extension.repositories.extensions.xwiki.org.auth.user=someuser
extension.repositories.extensions.xwiki.org.auth.user=password

Distribution Wizard improvements

The welcome step now lists only the available steps. For instance, when you install XWiki for the first time you don't have any extensions to upgrade so the "Extensions" step is not available.

DistributionWizard-emptyDatabase.png

When a step is done we visually mark it.

DistributionWizard-stepDone.png

Miscellaneous

  • XWiki's multiwiki feature (a.k.a "virtual mode") now works with the HSQLDB database
  • It's now possible to configure the LDAP timeout. See xwiki.authentication.ldap.timeout property in xwiki.cfg file.
  • New available Rendering syntax: APT
  • Technical pages of the IRCBot Application are now hidden and the application now registers itself in the Application panel:

    ircbotapp.png

  • Search Admin UI improvements ():

    searchAdminUINew.png

  • Automatically register translations for the FAQ and IRCBot applications
  • Important Bug Fixes:
    • Fixed failure to import Office documents when using Filesystem Attachments.
    • Fixed regression that caused "share by email" and "reset password" functions to fail to send any email.

See the full list of JIRA issues fixed in this release.

For Developers

New Localization Module

A new localization module has been introduced to replace the old XWikiMessageTool.

See Localization Module for more details.

REST API improvements

Some improvements have been done to the REST API in order to allow more powerful searches of the data stored in the wiki.

  • Results can be ordered using the /wikis/{wikiName}/search and /wikis/{wikiName}/spaces/{spaceName}/search resources with the following parameters:
  • Advanced search queries can be specified using /wikis/{wikiName}/query resources with the following parameters:
    • q: the query to be executed (it depends on the query type)
    • type: hql, xwql or lucene. Depending on the query type, the q parameter will contain a query matching the type
    • Standard parameters like start, number can be specified to control the number of the results to be returned.
  • Multi-wiki Lucene search using the /wikis/query resource with the following parameters:
    • q: the Lucene query handled by the Lucene plugin (Lucene Plugin)
    • wikis: a comma separated list of wikis where to perform the search.
  • XARs can be imported in Wikis by POSTing it to the /wikis/{wikiName}
  • New wikis can be created using the /wikimanager resource. (This resource is only available with XWiki Enterprise Manager)

For more information see XWiki RESTful API

In addition there was an XWiki REST API refactoring done with the introduction of a new xwiki-platform-rest-api module containing all resource declarations. This is important for client and modules willing to use the REST API so that they can have all the information about resources using Java annotation. See XWiki RESTful API.

Execution context property declarations

Execution context properties can now be associated with various metadata attributes.  See the documentation on the execution context for more information.

New Scope property for wiki components and UI extensions

A scope can now be defined for wiki components and UI extensions, it allows to restrict for which wiki(s) or which user they will be available:

  • Current Wiki, the component/UI extension will be available in the current wiki
  • Global, the component/UI extension will be available in all the wikis (wiki farms)
  • Current User, the component/UI extension will only be available for its author 

Deprecated and Retired projects

  • The userdirectorty and usertools plugins have been retired since they were unmaintained and mostly replaced by other features such as the Invitation module.

Upgrades

The following dependencies have been upgraded:

Miscellaneous

  • New org.xwiki.rendering.block.CompositeBlock introduce to allow passing several Blocks as one Block
  • New $services.model.getEntityReferenceValue method that returns the value configured for a specific entity type
  • Many classes in the REST API Server module that were not meant to be part of the public API have been moved to internal packages. This was done to correct a mistake that was done when the REST API module was initially developed.
  • Fixed a bug about incorrect results in multi-wiki lucene search in the REST API.
  • Add a java.util.Locale converter which allow:
    • using Locale in rendering macro parameter(s)
    • support Java method with Locale parameter(s) in Velocity. See Method Arguments Uberspector for more details.
  • Various String language based API of com.xpn.xwiki.XWiki and com.xpn.xwiki.doc.XWikiDocument classes are now deprecated for their newly introduced java.util.Locale equivalents.
  • Activity Stream UI and Color Theme UI have been moved to their own modules.

Translations

The following translations have been updated: 

Tested Browsers

Here's the list of browsers tested with this version (i.e. browsers that we've tested as working - Check the list of supported browsers):

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Firefox
10.6.1

Known issues

Test Report

You can check the manual test report to learn about what was tested and the results on various browsers.

Backward Compatibility and Migration Notes

General Notes

You may also want to import the default wiki XAR in order to benefit from all the improvements listed above.

Always make sure you compare your xwiki.cfg and xwiki.properties files with the newest version since some configuration parameters were added. Note that you should add xwiki.store.migration=1 so that XWiki will attempt to automatically migrate your current database to the new schema. Make sure you backup your Database before doing anything.

Issues specific to XWiki 4.3

  • Since the userdirectorty and usertools have been retired you'll need to make sure that your xwiki.cfg configuration files doesn't reference them anymore in the plugins property.
  • The methods setUrlPatternMatcher and getUrlPatternMatcher have been removed from the core class com.xpn.xwiki.XWiki.  The underlying URLPatternMatcher could not really be used as a singleton instance and was causing irregular failures in the basic authentication method.  Thus these methods cannot be meaningfully relied upon and have therefore been removed.
  • When setting the value using setValue (or setList) on a list field in an XWiki object, the list will now be copied.  To be able to update the list, you must call getValue (or getList) and update the returned list.  This is due to .

API Breakages

The following APIs were modified since XWiki 4.2:

<clirr output here>
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