TeamDesk Blog

Unlimited External Customers license is available now

A long-awaited Unlimited External Customers license is going to be introduced to accommodate an unlimited number of external customers for a flat rate^*.

Letting an unlimited number of your external customers logging right into the system, you would no longer need to create special web portals for external users. This would not only save you significant expenses for a complicated JavaScript programming, but would also keep your system flexible and customizable.

Your external customers will be logging-in under their individual logins/passwords, so you'll be able to assign them individual roles to precisely restrict their access to the system.
Overall, managing all of your customers within an integrated system and giving them an access to a relevant part of their data would allow you to reduce costs and improve communications with your partners and clients due to:

• allowing your partners accessing their relevant information and participating in your applications according to their "roles";
• effective collaboration with your customers and improved customer documentation sharing and management;
• planning and controlling joint events with your partners and customers;
• improving your customer service and relations with your partners;
• creation of additional self-services.

^* Unlimited External Customers license will not be available in the Starter Edition.

More dynamic in the forms

We've just released an facility to control column behavior in the forms.

You can now specify the condition and the set of changes to apply to the form's columns when the condition is met.

Consider the following scenario:

We have an Activity table that will store two types of activities: Tasks and Events. The have something is common: the Type, Subject, Assigned To and Description column apply to both types. Due Date, Status and Priority apply to Tasks only while Location, Start Date and Duration apply to Events only. Also, we want to require user input to Assigned To column when the type is Task. Here is the screenshot from column's setup:

Now we'll set up the form's behavior.

Visit Forms > Customize form behavior.

By default – if nothing is specified – TeamDesk will maintain its current behavior – display all columns in view mode and display editable columns only in edit mode. We'll need to set it up in a little different way.

First, in Default section we'll hide the type specific columns.

Then we'll define the condition to check whether the Type is Task – the interface is identical to the view's filters and specify the column settings for Type-specific columns.

Finally we'll define another condition to check whether the Type is Event and, again, behavior for event specific columns.

Let's test what we have:

Colorization for summary views and charts

We’ve extended summary views and charts with colorization formula functionality.

As in table views, the formula should calculate the color of the row (bar, column, wedge) for the summary view or return NULL to use default color provided by TeamDesk.

Obviously, the columns you can use in the formula are limited to the columns you group by.

For example, if you have a pie chart the calculate counts of tasks by priority you may now use a formula:

Case([Priority], “High”, “red”, “Low”, “blue”)

to color the wedge that corresponds to high priority tasks with red and low priority tasks with blue.

Application Difference Tool

Today we've added the simple tool to compare two applications. You can find it in Setup > Setup tab > Tools section > Diff Applications link.

It prompts you to select the application to compare current application to (you must have access to a setup section of the application to have it listed) and displays differences found in columns and tables. Tables and columns existing in your application only are highlighted in green, tables and columns missing in your application are highlighted in red. Columns that are present in both applications but differ in settings are highlighted in blue and the differences are displayed next to column name.

On the screenshot above, our new application is missing Resource table and Hourly Rate and Skill lookups to it. Costs formula is changed to use fixed hourly rate and new Skill Type column is added.

Trigonometic Support

TeamDesk is extended to support trigonometic functions:

Acos(n)	arccosine, returns the angle, in radians, whose cosine is the specified by n;
Asin(n)	arcsine, returns the angle, in radians, whose sine is the specified by n;
Atan(n)	arctangent, returns the angle in radians whose tangent is a specified by n;
Atan(x, y)	returns the angle, in radians, between the positive x-axis and the ray from the origin to the point specified by x and y;
Cos(n)	returns the trigonometric cosine of the angle n, specified in radians;
Cot(n)	returns the trigonometric cotangent of the angle n, specified in radians;
Degrees(n)	returns the corresponding angle in degrees for an angle n specified in radians;
Radians(n)	returns the corresponding angle in radians for an angle n specified in degrees;
Pi()	returns the constant value of PI;
Sin(n)	returns the trigonometric sine of the angle n, specified in radians;
Tan(n)	returns the trigonometric tangent of the angle n, specified in radians;

New Summary Function: Index

We've extended TeamDesk summary columns with Index function.

The purpose of the function is to extract the value from the specific record in the detail record set.

How it works? Detail records are filtered, and then sorted in the order specified in Sort By property. Each record assigned an index number starting from 1. The Index function picks up the value specified in Value Column property from the record with an index as specified in the Index property.

Suppose you have Contact table and Phones table related one-Contact-to-many-Phones, and you want to display phone of the type "Primary" in the contact record. Here, Index comes to help. Create a Primary Phone summary column, set its filter to check for phone type, set an index to 1, and the value column to phone number.

You can achieve similar results with Minumum/Maximum function, yet min/max approach is less predictable (as returned result strictly depends on the value) and may cause severe performance bottlenecks when having a lot of detail records as all of them should be processed to calculate the value.

Updated 09/03/2009

You can either type an numeric value for the index or use the column to take index from.

Are you ready for v2?

As you may already know, we've changed the way of handling NULL values and improved division by zero error indentification. With such a radical changes we were not able to maintain full backward compatibility; as the result, applications created before 10th of June, and their copies still use old logic, let's call it v1, while newer applications use new one - v2.

Below is the brief outline of changes in numeric and duration columns and formulas; other data types are not affected.

In v1, any arithmetical or functional operation with NULL (blank, empty) value results to NULL. NULL does not compare to anything, including the NULL, and requires special form of check via IsNull() function. "Blank as zero" column option can be set to automatically replace NULL with zero during the calculations.

In v2, the logic is identical to the behavior when "Blank as zero" is always set: when calculating, TeamDesk treats numeric or duration NULLs as zeroes. As the result, functions that check the result for NULL become obsolete.

There is no need for Nz() as TeamDesk applies this logic by default.

IsNull() is no longer applicable to the formulas as they do not produce NULLs. But the database can hold blank values distinct from zeroes, and you may still need to check for blanks. New IsBlank() function checks for NULLs, but it applies to data columns only. IsNull() is removed.

As we are planning to migrate all applications to v2 sooner or later, we have created the tool to help identifying these issues. The tool tries to compile all formulas in your v1 application from the v2 perspective and lists the objects (formulas, views, workflow rules) where you may encounter the problem after the migration. You may find a link to the tool on the Setup tab, Application section, Check NULL handling link. Check your app now, and let us know if you are ready to migrate.

By the way, v2 application administrators can use this tool to identify the problems with formulas throughout the application.

Alert System

In this release we are introducing News & Alerts system.

This feature will allow us to keep administrators and regular users informed about new TeamDesk updates, announcements and maintenance alerts.

Check the menu at the top of the page. There is a new item that displays count of unread messages & alerts. When it is displayed white on red, there is at least one unread high priority message in the list.

New way to handle NULLs and divisions by zero

...that's what we were working on over past couple of months.

When performing numeric calculations TeamDesk used to distinguish between NULL (that's when user left input field blank) and zero. NULL is a special value that does not compare to anything and requires special form of check for it. Moreover result of any arithmetical operation with NULL is also NULL and here we received a lot of questions like "I'm using the formula [A]+[B]+[C] and the result is blank value, why?" The answer is simple: A (or B or C) is blank. Ok, but for non-techie user it's a bit hard to understand.

We had an option that control NULL behavior during the calculations, called "Blank as zero" that substituted NULL values with zeros during the calculations but this option was often turned off.

Another reoccurring problem was the division by zero error. It's not a secret we are performing calculations using underlying database engine (namely, Microsoft SQL Server) and when first division by zero is encountered, it stops data extraction immediately returning the error message. Unfortunately, without any kind of location information. So user ended up with "Division by zero" message on screen with small chance to guess the formula that caused the error to fix it.

Finally we decided to address both problems at once.

Coghead Import Tool: Release Notes

03-11-2009

Minor update:

• fixed restoration from schema-only backups
• added support for decimal data type

02-27-2009

An update was released today. Here is the list of changes:

• Previous all-or-nothing transactional model has been deprecated. The tool still stops on first error when parsing the data model, however the data import pass now logs all errors to the application dashboard. It would be faster to correct few data errors by hand rather than wait for tool's update;
• Attachment files are now imported;
• Added support for multi-application backup files. As TeamDesk does not support links between applications, everything is imported into a single app;
• Calculated values and aggregates are mapped to formula types to ease the transition; The formula still needs to be rewritten manually;
• Coghead groups are displayed as collapsible sections in the form. As sections in TeamDesk do not nest, nested groups may generate empty sections - they should be removed manually;
• Now we are trying to create column's name from widget's label. Duplicate names are resolved by adding numeric suffix to a name;
• For the links, the lookup field is generated for the display value.

02-25-2009

First beta version of Coghead Import Tool was released.

Due to differences in the Coghead and TeamDesk architectures, parsing Coghead backup to create TeamDesk application that works identically is almost impossible task, so we have concentrated mainly on importing the data model and the data.

Coghead does not limit the length of the strings. TeamDesk, rather, provides two separate types: Text, with limited length, and Multi-line Text. The length of the text in the latter is not limited. While importing, we are looking at the widget associated with the field. If it is a multiline input box or rich-text widget, we are importing to Multi-line text. 

Coghead uses hierarchical storage for the groups. TeamDesk uses table model. Coghead groups are imported into separate table named Table:Group linked to the main table.

For calculated fields and aggregates the formula is not translated: the formula language, Coghead uses is absolutely different from TeamDesk and writing the translator will take a lot of time. Values from these columns are imported, the formulas are placed in the column description. After the import these columns can be eventually converted to TeamDesk counterparts: Formulas and Summaries. (changed)

Coghead's links provide display property. TeamDesk separates the value to display via Lookup columns. Display property is ignored when importing the link. (fixed)

Importing of grids (linked lists) is not supported, though they may be re-created in TeamDesk through relationships and views.

Attachment fields are created, yet files are not imported. This will be fixed in the next version of the tool. (fixed)

The tool will evolve. If it does not do something right now, it does not mean it will never do it. Check back periodically, we'll update this article when new features will be available.