VidiFlow 22.1 Release Notes [VF RN]

The following items on the list encompass breaking changes, features, and fixes that are relevant for the major release.

Release 22.1

Breaking Changes

Setup and Operations

Dependencies and component updates

The following central components were updated and will be shipped in the noted version, along with relevant product and service dependencies:

.NET 6 migration

All VidiFlow 22.1 components use Microsoft .NET 6.

Enable VidiCore elastic index backup

To allow backups of the VidiCore elastic index, some configuration options were added to the VidiFlow deployment.

Features

New agents and tasks

Tasks support item-to-item relationships

Two new tasks are introduced to support item-to-item relationships: “Create Item-to-Item Relation” allows one to create a new relationship between two items, while “Delete All Item Relations“ deletes all relations of one item. Additionally, adjustments to the “Delete” tasks were made so these support deleting a specific relationship.

Search for VidiCore Items in batches

Besides the existing task “Search for VidiCore Items” an additional task is now available which allows to search for items even if the amount of found items is larger than 100. The new task “Search for VidiCore Items in batches“ returns a search cursor allowing subsequent calls to receive more results.

List of updated tasks

RenderItemSequence

The task RenderItemSequence was changed to not conform metadata after rendering by default. This could lead to a high amount of unused data. If confirmation is needed, it must be triggered by the optional new task parameter “ConformMetadata”.

AddDeletionLock

The task AddDeletionLock was changed in the way that setting a deletion lock in the past is no longer possible and will raise a boundary event.

Delete

The task Delete can now also delete item-to-item relationships.

Create Common Index File for Proxy Files

The format of the common index files changed due to performance reasons. The known CIX-files are e smaller, but they are accompanied by TIX-files per video and audio track. These files will also be registered at the same shape.

Workflow Monitor

Saved queries

Workflow Monitor now supports saving and loading often used queries in a new sub-menu. The currently active query can easily be saved with a name and description. All saved queries will be shown in the menu for quick access. In the “Manage queries” dialog queries can be renamed or deleted.

Queries are stored in the user's browser cache and limited to 20 entries. To share or also backup queries it is possible to copy/paste single queries or import/export all queries.

Navigate between calling and sub-workflow instance details

It is now possible to navigate between called and calling workflows in the Workflow Monitor details view. Call activities now show the entry “Activity Instance(s)” as a hyperlink that opens the called workflow in another tab. The link “Open calling workflow” opens the parent workflow of a sub-workflow.

Support 3rd party monitoring links

Many VidiFlow workflow tasks control 3rd party systems which have their own monitoring websites. Workflow Monitor now supports showing one or more direct links to these websites in the details view. Agents need to be adapted to return the link in their contract to support this feature.

Details view shows agent name and task name

The agent name and the task name are now shown in the Details View for every service task.

Support correlation ID for Kibana link

When opening the Kibana logs from the Workflow Monitor’s Details View, the correlation ID is now part of the Kibana filter. This should make it easier to adapt the Kibana filters for additional tasks of the same workflow instance.

Indicator for more existing workflows better visible

The indicator showing that more than the maximum configured number of workflows is available is now presented by a different icon.

Filter for “today” remove when a free-text filter is set

If the Workflow Monitor is started with a free-text filter in the URL, the default filter for “today” is disabled to allowed monitoring of all older workflows matching the free-text filter.

Workflows Designer

Copy-paste between different workflows

The Workflow Designer now supports copy and paste between different workflows. Activity IDs will automatically be adjusted when pasting and if a task being copied uses a workflow variable as input or output, the variable will automatically be created in the workflow it is being pasted to.

This feature works only between different tabs in one browser instance. Copy-paste from one browser instance to another one is not possible.

Rule Designer

Documentation field and commit messages

The Rule Designer now supports adding rule documentation in the Rule Designer. When saving rules, the Rule Designer asks the user to enter a commit message to document the changes. The rule documentation can be seen in the VidiFlow portal, a ConfigPortal update to support both features will follow in a future release.

VidiFlow Portal

Usage information for tasks, rules, and workflows

The existing views for workflow, agent, and rule contracts were enhanced to show the usage of all specific contract versions. If a contract version is used in one or more workflows, a new information button is shown in the column “Action”. Clicking on it shows a dialog presenting all workflows that use the specific contract version.

The data used by the Portal are gathered by a new backend service and stored in an SQL database. A resync feature is available to fill the database initially, this will be called automatically by a Hangfire job after deploying VidiFlow 22.1.

Log Export

The log-export feature gives users the possibility to export a set of log file entries based on any Kibana search query. The query can be copied from Kibana and entered in the Log Export View in the VidiFlow portal. Then the log file entries will be queried and zipped in one step when clicking the “download logs” button. Additionally, it is possible to export all log entries of an entered time range.

The Log Import view in the VidiFlow portal can be used to import the logs into an existing or new Elastic index for the log analysis.

Performance, stabilization, and other improvements

New JavaScript engine for Camunda script task execution

VidiFlow uses the Camunda workflow engine for workflow execution. Camunda is now shipped with a different JavaScript Engine called GraalVM JavaScript. Please refer to the Camunda blog article Added support for Java 15 and GraalVM JavaScript for more information.

Before updating to VidiFlow 22.1 in a production environment it is highly recommended to test all existing script tasks in a pre-productive environment.

Business rule deployment performance

The business rule deployment has been adapted to match earlier optimizations in workflow deployment to enhance the general performance of rule execution. After the changes, rules are immediately deployed after saving changes in ConfigPortal. After staging a rule, the deployment is triggered automatically.

Product workflows update

The product workflows delivered with a VidiFlow deployment were updated. There is workflow documentation available now. All used tasks are referenced in their latest very and the workflow object ID is supported.

Single Elastic index for log files

Recently, the log file entries from VidiFlow were split into two different Elastic indices. With VidiFlow 22.1, only one index is used for all services hosted on Kubernetes.

When updating from previous versions, the additional log file index will be kept, but no longer filled by any services hosted on Kubernetes.

Fixes