Squiz Labs Blog - The latest news from the R&D division of Squiz®

Squiz Matrix Newsletter #397

Labs has been working diligently this week in preparation for next week's October releases of Squiz Matrix versions 4.8.7, 4.10.3 and the release candidate of our 4.12.x branch. Please note that these releases will be delayed to Tuesday October 2nd, due to the Labour Day long weekend.

New features introduced in our 4.12.x branch include new custom Change Password design options, new User Subscription and Scheduling Settings screens for Bulkmail Job assets, a Call REST Resource completion action for the E-Commerce Checkout Page asset, and additional SAML options for user linking and creation.

The latest Squiz Matrix Automatic Upgrade scripts will also be available on the Squiz Matrix site.

Check out the Squiz Labs blog on Monday for all the latest on these new releases, including download links, release notes and more!

This week we have three new features to report, including new operations on the JavaScript API for context functionality. Continue reading below for more information on all this week's features.

New Context Functionality on the JavaScript API

Due for release in version 4.10.3 (October 2nd 2012)

Five new operations have been added to provide new Context functionality on the JavaScript API. These functions can get enabled via the new Get Contexts and Set Context options on the Details screen of the JS API.

The getAlternateContext() operation will retrieve the appropriate alternate context on the system, applicable to the current situation (e.g. site URL) based on an evaluation of a context's conditions.

The getCurrentContext() operation will retrieve the current context active on the system.

The getAllContexts() operation will retrieve all contexts that have been defined on the system.

These three operations each take the following parameters:  

• all_info: a boolean determining whether to return all information for returned contexts. By default, these operations will return just the name and ID of contexts.
• dataCallback: the custom callback function.

The setContext() operation sets the system to a supplied context. This operation takes the following parameters:

• context_id: the ID of the context you want to activate on the system.
• dataCallback: the custom callback function.

Lastly, the restoreContext() operation restores the system to the previously set context. This can be used, for example, in conjunction with the setContext() operation.

These new operations have been added to enhance the usage of the JavaScript API, providing new functionality for contexts within Squiz Matrix.

Contextable Related Asset Metadata Fields

Due for release in version 4.10.3 (October 2nd 2012)

Squiz Matrix's metadata field types allow you to set different types of metadata information on your assets, for example, plain text, dates or thesaurus terms.

The majority of these metadata field types allow you to configure whether this metadata is contextable or not. This, however, was previously not the case for the Related Asset field, which did not provide this option (these fields were context aware by default).

The enhancement expands this functionality to include the Related Asset metadata field type, set on its Details screen.

Enhancements to the system_integrity_fix_char_encoding.php Script

Due for release in version 4.12.0 (November 5th 2012)

The system_integrity_fix_char_encoding.php script replaces all non-utf8 smart quote chars by their respective regular counterpart chars.

This minor enhancement adds additional functionality to this script, allowing you to specify the encoding to update the system to.

This enhancement also modifies the usage of the script, the new usage of this script is as follows:

$ php system_integrity_fix_char_encoding.php --system=<SYSTEM_ROOT> --old=<OLD_CHARSET> [--new=<NEW_CHARSET>] [--rootnode=<ROOT_NODE>] [--report]

$ php system_integrity_fix_char_encoding.php --system=[system_root] --old=UTF-8 --new=iso-8859-11 --rootnode=100 --report