Release Notes - 2022. 06. 01.
In May, the focus of the whole Horizon Planner team was entirely on one thing: improving our charts’ performance as much as technically possible. We’re happy to say that the result of this effort significantly outperforms even our best-case expectations, and we even had some time to top off this release with a couple of new features as well.
Chart improvements
The most important improvement to the chart is the added performance. If you are interested, you can read our related blog post for all the technical details. But even if you aren’t, you may still appreciate the many related features we implemented while we were working with the chart:
- the chart header can show week numbers as well;
- assignment and holiday labels can move with the chart to stay visible;
- it is possible to move the chart vertically by dragging the background;
- new Open All and Close All actions in the Gantt chart;
- horizontal dragging became a lot smoother;
- zooming with the mouse wheel is done in finer steps;
- better vertical position control, significantly reducing possible vertical “jumps”.
Timetables filtering
We’ve been continuously extending the filtering capabilities of the Timetables chart. It was already possible to filter resources by name, tags, capabilities, and even capability levels.
While these filtering options cover most use-cases, there was one notable exception: sometimes the planner knows exactly which resources need to be visible on the chart, regardless of their capabilities or tags.
To plug this gap, users can now choose from two modes in the Timetables filter dialog:
- capability-based filtering, which works just like it used to in previous versions, and
- exact resource selection, where users will be able to select any number of resources using a familiar auto-complete field.
The two filtering modes are fully independent of each other, meaning users can switch between them without the fear of losing the configuration of the other, but only the selected one is active at any given time.
Network monitoring and support
Every now and then, single-page web application users bump into various issues that are the result of non-application-related problems and whose real cause is often not obvious to non-technical people. Two typical examples are being temporarily offline or using a now unsupported client application after a new release.
Starting with this version, Horizon Planner constantly monitors its network connection and compatibility with the server. We’ve added a status icon next to the user menu in the top right corner of the application that shows the current application status. In case a persistent error is detected, Horizon Planner will display the problem and also lock itself to prevent the user from working with stale or invalid data.
Additionally, we’ve added a new, “Download App State” action to the user menu. Finding the cause of obscure issues can be tricky and very time-consuming, especially when technical support doesn’t have the data that would be necessary for a thorough analysis. With this action, users will be able to download the current internal state of Horizon Planner and send it to technical support to aid investigation and ensure that issues are resolved as fast as possible.
More filtering options in reports
Until this release, assignment-related reports – Assignment Overview, Assignment Table, and all customer-specific reports that are derived from them – in Horizon Planner were limited in the sense that they could only provide an activity-based perspective of assignments through the use of the activity tag filter.
We have finally completed these reports by adding a resource tag filter to them, so users can now not only choose between activity and resource-based perspectives, but also combine them in any way to generate exactly the desired Excel reports.
This feature necessarily complicates the affected reports a bit, but hopefully not too much. Nevertheless, our aim remains the same as it was before: to keep the reporting experience simple and easy to use.