L2021.8 Release Notes

For a list of release dates and Sisense's end of support schedule, see Sisense Life Cycle.

Release Overview

Release L2021.8 provides a number of new features and significant improvements to Sisense for Linux. For example, new capability to resend Sisense account activation emails, query ElastiCubes from local storage, enhanced sorting capabilities for Pivot tables, and more.

What's New

Administration

Resending Sisense invitations to users

• Administrators can identify users who have not activated their Sisense account and resend an account activation invitation, see Managing Dashboard Users.
• Go to the Admin page and click Users from the User Management menu. In the Last Active column, the Resend invitation feature sends a new email invitation to the user.

• Resending the activation email resets the expiration timeout for the invitation to the default setting (7 days), and the expiration period can be changed, see General Settings.

Query ElastiCubes from local storage

• Added a new option to query the cube from the local storage.
• Using local storage instead of shared storage decreases the time required to query the cube, after the first build on local storage.
• Enabling this option automatically enables the interim build on local storage option.

ElastiCube

Export multiple ElastiCubes to AWS S3 service

• The SI CLI includes a command to export multiple Elasticubes to an S3 storage location, see Using Sisense CLI Commands.
• You must include the S3 access key, secret key, bucket name, AWS region, and Elasticube names to use this command.

What's Improved

Administration

Alert to use a custom email server

• Sisense alerts administrators that a custom email server has not been configured, see Setting Up Custom Email Servers.
• The custom email reminder appears because Sisense recommends that all customers use their SMTP email server for consistent and predictable email service.

New Exporting Engine for Exporting PDFs and Images, enabled by default

• A new exporting engine was introduced for exporting PDFs and images.
• Applies to exporting dashboards and widgets (pivots and tables) to PDF and PNG formats.
• To verify that the new exporting engine is in use in your Sisense deployment, check the Export to PDF and Image V2 toggle, located below the Sisense Base Configuration settings (which should be enabled).

The new exporting engine:

• Improves the overall performance of the export
• Enables usage of the ES6 JavaScript in the dashboard scripts and web plugins
• Automatically uses "ignoreWarn": true mode
• Successfully generates an asset even when one or more widgets fail to load on the dashboard (e.g.: When one of the plugins used is disabled in the system.)

Important: RESTful API
To effectively use Sisense’s new exporting engine when exporting via RESTful API, make sure to use the following endpoints:

/api/v1/export/dashboards/:oid/pdf  

/api/v1/export/dashboards/:oid/png

Instead of the old endpoints:

/api/v1/dashboards/:oid/export/pdf 

/api/v1/dashboards/:oid/export/png

Widgets

Pivot table sorting

• Sorting a Pivot table by multiple values allows you additional options to display data to users.
• You can simultaneously sort multiple values by different rows to achieve a more complex analysis of the table’s data, see Pivot Tables.

Box & Whisker Plot

• The Box& Whisker Plot widget is supported for live models when the new translator is enabled.
• This widget is used to visually describe the distribution, variability, and center of a data set along an axis.
• To enable the new translator, see the Managing the New Translation Service section in Viewing Queries to Data Sources.

What's Fixed

APIs

• The REST API v0.9 /datasources/{cubeName}/sql can be set to output a CSV file.

Dashboards and Widgets

• You can enter customized minimum and maximum values for the Scatter Chart.
• Embedded images are correctly displayed when the Pivot Tables table is exported to PDF, see Downloading Widgets to PDF.
• Creating and Editing a Formula with more than 10 measured values correctly outputs the values.

Data Modeling

Usage of third party JARs is supported in Connectors Plugins.

Deployment and Upgrading

• Improved system security for Sisense deployments using Docker.

Limitation

• The Lookup function is only for defining custom columns and not custom tables, see Logical Functions.