Oct 5, 2023 / 😅 Notifications settings, Send attachments via email, Bezier curves for connector lines

Notifications settings

We’ve got a lot of feedback about spammy notifications. Now we’re giving notifications configuration power to you, so you can fine-tune events and channels for notifications. Navigate to Settings → Notifications and click some checkboxes. In fact, you can disable all notifications and even hide Inbox from the left menu completely :sweat_smile:.

You can also fine tune Watch rules and disable some. For example, you may no longer watch entities you are assigned to automatically.

Bezier curves for connector lines

Now you have the ability to use bezier curves to transform connection lines. This feature is especially useful when you need to create highly curved lines to connect shapes that are far apart in a complex diagram.

2023-10-05 13.29.18

Automations: Send email supports attachments

Now you can attach files in Send Email action.

File can be attached by setting file ids or file names separated by comma. Templates are supported. Here are some examples:

  • All files of entity can be send as email attachment by setting template:{= Files:Id =}
  • Formula can be used to send files with specific name. For example

[Step 1 Project].Files.Filter(Name = "My.pdf").Join(Name, ",")

Limitations: Only 10 files can be attached to one email and the file size of each attachment should be less than 5Mb.

Automations: Generate PDF file by treating template as html page

We extended Attach PDF using template Action. Now it is possible to check an option Treat template as HTML page and the HTML template will be rendered to PDF as is. This allows to provide custom css styles and use any HTML elements and layout.

NOTE: Markdown is not processed in this case.

Example of HTML Page Template:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <style>
        body {
            padding-top: 200px;
            padding-left: 200px;
        }
        #circle {
            width: 300px;
            height: 300px;
            -webkit-border-radius: 150px;
            background: blue;
        }
        .text {
            padding-top: 100px;
            font-size: large;
            text-align: center;
            vertical-align: center;
            color: yellow;
        }
    </style>
<head>
<body>
<div id="circle">
    <div class="text">{{Name}}<br/>{{Planned Dates}}</div>
</div>
</body>
</html> 

The html above will be rendered to a super-useful PDF like this:

Open Database context menu with right click

We’re making Fibery navigation consistent, so now you can right click on a Database to access its context menu.

:shrimp: Fixed Bugs

  • Fields creation results in field already exists but it does not!
  • Exception in timeline in attempt to access Backlog
  • In case Name has a long value and user does ‘Fit column’ then scroll bar is gone and he is not able to make width smaller
  • User who is not yet logged in is met by a barrage of errors
  • “[SystemPanel]: Cannot read properties of undefined” error when renaming fields on DB screen
  • Calendar view: Card box is bigger than actual event in Day mode
15 Likes

Nice! This has some useful functionality. :slightly_smiling_face:

4 Likes

Awesome release :smile:

3 Likes

Awesome!!! Fourth Fibery Thursday in a row! :yarn::zap::zap::zap::zap:

Great features, thanks a lot!

1 Like

This is a great & unexpected development. I’ve already been testing

I hope this is not taken as a “looking a gift horse in the mouth” situation, but I had a few improvement suggestions :grin:

Entity Reference Rendering
This has been an outstanding issue, in that inline entity references in rich text areas are not rendered at all. It would be so helpful if we could just get the name of the entity back in simple text so context is not lost

Page settings
It would be great if we had some control on the generated pdf page itself, in particular:

  • Page Size: I haven’t found any options to control the page size. It would be great if we had the ability to choose from standard sizes and set custom sizes (in mm or in)

  • Page Orientation: This isn’t absolutely necessary if users are able to set height and width, but it would be a great thing to have if you were able to select A4 paper and set it to landscape orientation

  • Page Margins: I have tried setting margin on the body tag, but it doesn’t seem to have any particular effect. It would be great if each of the margins could be individually set in some real-world units (mm or in)

Page Header & Footer
Since pagination is not known ahead of time, I think headers & footers need to be externally defined. A three part definition (left, centre, right) would be great, but even a single box at the top & bottom would be sufficient (some may argue even better), if it is possible to use html & css to set location of header/footer texts. Having full html capabilities in both areas would also allow access to entity information (like name and dates, etc.) which would be super helpful. To make it complete, it would be great to have access to the pagination variables (current page number and total pages).

5 Likes

Hi, @cannibalflea

Thanks for the feedback. We will think about it.

Thanks,
Oleg

4 Likes

I’ve been messing around with the PDF generator as well and after quite a bit of tinkering (I have basically no HTML or CSS experience) I’m starting to get some decent results, but struggling with some similar issues to @cannibalflea.

I was wondering of we could get some info on what parameters the built-in renderer uses to generate the files and if it’s possible to manipulate them in CSS?

I thinks it’s possible to set margins, page size, and special headers/footers specifically for different media types like printing, I’m wondering if we can do the same for Fibery PDF renders?

1 Like

Disregard all of this, I was incorrect, just leaving it up for context

Alright, managed to figure out a few things @cannibalflea:

  1. For page size, orientation, and margin can be modified with a @page rule in the CSS:
@page {
        size: a4 landscape;
        margin: auto;
        }
  1. I still haven’t figured out footers for page numbering, I tried to use paged.js but I couldn’t get it working. I’m going to try a few other things today.
2 Likes

@Tommy_Hedley I was trying to play around with the paged media at rules as well but it seems to be inconsistently applied (including some of the margins, page size, etc.).

I also noticed that Margin at-rules are also ignored (which makes sense because I don’t think it is implemented yet):

@page {
  /* margin box at top right showing page number */
  @bottom-right {
    content: "Page " counter(pageNumber);
  }
}

The final issue that I’ve found recently is that emoji’s render as monochrome and very often don’t render at all. I’ve tried a variety of font settings and other css tricks but nothing seems to have worked yet. I assume this has something to do with version of node used on the server side.

The thing that is really annoying is that entity references just disappear in the final PDF:

Once some of these issues are fixed, I am willing to contribute to a knowledge base article with some learnings as well as sample templates for the community to use (for example, an invoice template, meeting notes, quote, …)

2 Likes