Release Notes for XWiki 7.2 Release Candidate 1

Last modified by Thomas Mortagne on 2023/10/13

This is the release notes for XWiki Commons, XWiki Rendering, XWiki Platform and XWiki Enterprise. They share the same release notes as they are released together and have the same version.

This release candidate brings many Flamingo skin improvements to better present Nested Documents on top of the Nested Spaces concept. Similar improvements were made in applications like Solr Search, AWM, FAQ, Activity Stream and the Skin editor in order to be compatible with Nested Spaces. On the developers side, a new Select widget and a document picker were added to allow richer UIs to be created. Last but not least, 41 bugs were fixed in this release on the road towards the coming final 7.2 release.

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki 7.2M3)

Full list of issues fixed and Dashboard for 7.2.

Flamingo

Following the introduction of the Nested Documents feature, we have made some modifications to the Flamingo skin:

  • The welcome message from the main wiki home page has been updated.
  • The "Spaces" widget from the wiki dashboard has been replaced with "Pages" which shows the hierarchy of nested pages from that wiki.
  • For non terminal documents, we have introduced a "Page Administration", where you will find settings that concern the document and its children (it's actually the old space administration behind the scene). But we have also introduced 2 sections for setting rights on these pages:
    • a section to set rights for the document only.
    • a section to set rights for the document and its children.
  • For terminal documents, nothing changes, you can change the access rights of the page in the "edit" menu. The only addition is a "Administer Parent" link in the "More actions" menu to administer the parent page (which again is the space administration behind the scene).
  • The create action has been relooked (with the introduction of the "page type" field) and proposes to import an office document.
  • A new "children" viewer is now accessible in the "more actions" menu, along with the other viewers.
  • For Terminal Pages, a new "siblings" viewer is present, which replaces the old "space index" feature.

Solr Search

You can now search for nested documents using the Solr Search Application. The display of the search result location has been updated to support nested documents.

searchResultLocation.png

The "Space" facet has been replaced with a "Location" facet that supports nested documents. This allows you to search in a specific location in the page hierarchy.

searchLocationFacet.png

The "Page" facet has been removed by default because it doesn't bring value in the context of the nested documents: all non-terminal documents have the same name 'WebHome'. The "Wiki" facet is displayed by default only on the main wiki and only if you have multiple wikis.

Miscellaneous

  • When creating, copying or renaming a page you can now select a top level location from the tree picker (e.g. copy as top level page) even if you have a single wiki (i.e. only the main wiki). You do this by selecting the root of the tree (i.e. the wiki node).
  • The Document Tree Macro is now displaying a message when the tree is empty.

    emptyDocTree.png

    With the new showRoot parameter you can force the document tree to show the actual root node (either the one specified by the root parameter or the default root node).

  • A couple of bugs in the App Within Minutes Application, that were caused by the introduction of the Nested Documents feature, have been fixed.
  • It's now possible create new FAQs in Nested Spaces.
  • When using the XWiki Jetty distribution, a memory dump is automatically created in XWiki's data/ folder when an Out Of Memory error occurs.
  • The Activity Stream now also displays activity for Nested Spaces.
  • Skin editor now properly works for a nested skin document

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

For Developers

XWiki Select Widget

A new widget has been introduced, to have a rich select box:

xwiki-select.png

Document Picker

Two new Velocity macros has been added to allow selecting a document from a tree picker and to display the path (breadcrumbs) to the selected document.

locationPicker.png

Check the Document Picker documentation for more details.

Deprecated and Retired projects

<description of deprecated and retired projects>

Upgrades

The following dependencies have been upgraded:

Miscellaneous

  • The URL parameters ?viewer=children and ?viewer=backlinks have been added.
  • A new "siblings" viewer has been added, accessible both with ?viewer=siblings and ?xpage=siblings.
  • For ?viewer=children, ?xpage=children, ?viewer=siblings and ?xpage=siblings a new displayHidden parameter has been added. By default, the hidden documents are not displayed unless the user's configuration overwrites this.

Tested Browsers & Databases

Failed to execute the [velocity] macro. Cause: [The execution of the [velocity] script macro is not allowed in [xwiki:TestReports.ManualTestReportSummaryXWiki72RC1]. Check the rights of its last author or the parameters if it's rendered from another script.]. Click on this message for details.

Here is the list of browsers we support and how they have been tested for this release:

BrowserTest Result
Chrome30.pngGoogle Chrome 45Jira Tickets Marked as Fixed in the Release Notes
Firefox30.pngMozilla Firefox 40Not Tested
IE30.pngInternet Explorer 10Not Tested
IE30.pngInternet Explorer 11Not Tested
Safari30.pngSafari 5Not Tested

Here is the list of databases we support and how they have been tested for this release:

DatabaseTest Result
hypersql.pngHyperSQL 2.3.2Jira Tickets Marked as Fixed in the Release Notes
mysql.pngMySQL 5.6.24Not Tested
oracle.pngOracle 11.2Not Tested
postgresql.pngPostgreSQL 9.4.1Not Tested

For the full list of tests see this page.

Known issues

Backward Compatibility and Migration Notes

General Notes

When upgrading make sure you compare your xwiki.cfg, xwiki.properties and web.xml files with the newest version since some configuration parameters may have been modified or 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.

API Breakages

The following APIs were modified since XWiki 7.1.2:

  • New configuration option to change the size of the Job statuses cache:
    org.xwiki.job.JobManagerConfiguration: Method 'public int getJobStatusCacheSize()' has been added to an interface
  • Added missing methods to the DocumentModelBridge class, which are already implemented by XWikiDocument:
    org.xwiki.bridge.DocumentModelBridge: Method 'public org.xwiki.model.reference.DocumentReference getContentAuthorReference()' has been added to an interface
  • AbstractWrappingObject, AbstractSafeObject and ScriptSafeProvider have been moved to xwiki-commons-script:
    org.xwiki.extension.wrap.WrappingIterableResult: Removed org.xwiki.extension.internal.safe.AbstractSafeObject from the list of superclasses
    org.xwiki.extension.wrap.WrappingIterableResult: Removed org.xwiki.extension.wrap.AbstractWrappingObject from the list of superclasses
    org.xwiki.extension.wrap.WrappingIterableResult: Parameter 2 of 'public WrappingIterableResult(org.xwiki.extension.repository.result.IterableResult, org.xwiki.extension.internal.safe.ScriptSafeProvider)' has changed its type to org.xwiki.script.internal.safe.ScriptSafeProvider
    org.xwiki.filter.script.AbstractFilterScriptService: Changed type of field scriptProvider from org.xwiki.extension.internal.safe.ScriptSafeProvider to org.xwiki.script.internal.safe.ScriptSafeProvider
    org.xwiki.extension.script.AbstractExtensionScriptService: Changed type of field scriptProvider from org.xwiki.extension.internal.safe.ScriptSafeProvider to org.xwiki.script.internal.safe.ScriptSafeProvider
  • com.xpn.xwiki.XWiki#localStringEntityReferenceSerializer now exists in oldcore, we do not need it in the aspect anymore:
    com.xpn.xwiki.XWikiCompatibilityAspect: Method 'public org.xwiki.model.reference.EntityReferenceSerializer ajc$interFieldGetDispatch$com_xpn_xwiki_XWikiCompatibilityAspect$com_xpn_xwiki_XWiki$localStringEntityReferenceSerializer(com.xpn.xwiki.XWiki)' has been removed
    com.xpn.xwiki.XWikiCompatibilityAspect: Method 'public void ajc$interFieldInit$com_xpn_xwiki_XWikiCompatibilityAspect$com_xpn_xwiki_XWiki$localStringEntityReferenceSerializer(com.xpn.xwiki.XWiki)' has been removed
    com.xpn.xwiki.XWikiCompatibilityAspect: Method 'public void ajc$interFieldSetDispatch$com_xpn_xwiki_XWikiCompatibilityAspect$com_xpn_xwiki_XWiki$localStringEntityReferenceSerializer(com.xpn.xwiki.XWiki, org.xwiki.model.reference.EntityReferenceSerializer)' has been removed
  • Not a breakage. The legacy method was not in the right place (which mean that it was not available so it actually fix a breakage):
    com.xpn.xwiki.XWikiCompatibilityAspect: Method 'public java.lang.Object getRenderingEngine()' has been removed
  • Young API. ExportURLFactoryContext been renamed to FilesystemExportContext and moved to the Filesystem URL scheme module

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