Pydio Cells & Enterprise 4.3.1

This release mostly focuses on Cells Flows new actions and usability improvements.

Cells Flows

Our no-code workflow engine ships many new interesting features, actions, and templates.

Handling Structured Data

Flows that manipulate structured data can easily become quite complex. Whether data comes from an external Rest API, from successive SmartForms submissions, or from platform usage statistics, transforming and creating "views" was previously doable in JSON only.

Meet the new Actions to Load/CRUD/Persist an SQLite database: automatically generate an SQL schema from an incoming JSON, feed with this data, and then perform complex SQL Queries to build dedicated views of the data.

The new SheetViewer (on the user side) is a complementary tool allowing the direct preview of the tables' contents (supports SQLite, CSV, and JSON out-of-the-box).

Finally, a new Javascript Action comes in handy as an Anko-Script replacement, for performing any kind of scripting operations in Javascript, and the new DataSelector (see below) ease creating loops for pipelining chunks of data.

Documents Generation: PDF, MD, DOCX Actions

Based on the powerful PDFCpu, the new PDF Action provides the ability to split, join, and watermark PDF pages (more operations to come). A ready-to-use PDF Flow template exposes this action as end-user's operations, via Webhooks.

Another new interesting action is the DOCX Placeholders replacement: create any DOCX file containing your own placeholders (defined as {keyName}) anywhere in text, header, titles, etc... and replace them with custom values to create new document on the fly.

Finally, the new Markdown Action provides out-of-the-box Markdown transformation to HTML or PDF. The latter could already be done using existing actions and external docker tool, but that one does not require any additional tool.

Together with the existing XLSX generator and workflow webhooks that expose a workflow and its parameters to end users, all these new components are ideal for creating workflows where documents need to be generated on the fly.

Cells Flows Better Usability

• New DataSelector similar to other "Queries" components, but applied to any arbitrary input (JSON) to loop over rows. It uses JSONPath to select rows inside incoming data, and can assign each row to a JsonBody or a Variable.
• New Flows Metadata provide additional usage instructions, icon, label, etc to Flows. All existing templates now use this to provide more "How To Use" instructions.
• Actions Parameters Forms better show fields "long description" in a tooltip, for better usability.
• Hit Ctrl+S to save Flow while editing
• Inputs/Outputs Normalization: all actions that are data-oriented should provide a generic way of getting input (from a node path, as raw binary, from a variable, etc) and passing their output to the next steps.
• Declare arbitrary data as Artifact, that will be pinned to the task. When the task has one string artifact, it is appended directly to the status in the Task List, avoiding the long list of "Complete" tasks that do not provide useful information.

Cells Enterprise Features

• Security Policies are now more dynamic than ever: rules' conditions can use GO-Template to make reference to the current context variables. This allows for example the usage of the current user login as a comparison value to show/hide some data.
• Override any internal action behavior: a new configuration section provides the ability to change the generic behavior of any actions, a.k.a the context in which they are displayed or not.

Other Minor Fixes

• Updated Markdown Viewer for more Markdown extension support. In Source Editor, the split-screen between the Source and the Markdown preview can now be resized.
• Fixed a regression that prevented unknown files from being opened with any user-chosen editor
• Fixed many glitches in the generic Form library

Upgrade Now

The upgrade is simply done using the in-app tool.

If you do not know about Cells 4.2 new interface and new features, you should read more here.