Wijmo 2023 v1 Has Landed

May 12 2023

Wijmo has just shipped its first major release of 2023. This release includes support for React 18 Strict Mode, some major accessibility enhancements, dynamic culture support, and more.

Improved Support for React 18 Strict Mode

In our last release, we added support for React 18, but there were still some limitations and warnings in Strict Mode. In this release, we are pleased to announce support for React 18 Strict Mode. Strict Mode helps developers find common bugs during development, so we are glad to support it inside Wijmo!

Accessibility Improvements

We have been working closely with some of our valued customers to fine-tune accessibility in Wijmo, especially in some more complex features. Here are some of the improvements we’ve added in this release:

Improved FlexGridFilter popups for filtering by condition and by value to match announcements in Excel
Improved Selector checked state announcement
Improved Selector description label
Improved how screen readers interpret visually hidden columns
Added headersFocusability property to FlexGrid, which allows keyboard navigation into the row and column headers
Added ariaLabel property to FlexGrid for giving the grid a caption

Along with these, we have also fixed other minor bugs related to our component behaviors in different screen readers.

We have been advised by a few important customers that they want end users to be able to navigate into the headers of the grid using keyboard arrows.

To support this behavior, we have added a new headersFocusability property which can be set to: None (default), Row, Column, or Both. These settings will determine whether keyboard navigation will continue into the row or column headers. When headers get focus, they are also fine-tuned for accessibility so that they are announced properly by screen readers.

Dynamic Culture Swapping in Globalization

Modern JavaScript applications need to be able to adapt and rerender quickly. We have always supported globalization in Wijmo, but the culture was not able to be swapped at runtime in certain scenarios.

To fully support this, we have added a changeCulture API that allows you to swap cultures at runtime, which will cause the components to rerender as needed to reflect the new culture.

Change How Empty Edits Behave in FlexGrid

FlexGrid will trigger a changed event in some cases when an empty cell is edited, but not changed. For example, a cell bound to a null value, if edited and committed, becomes an empty string. You can now change this behavior by setting the new commitEmptyEdits boolean. By default, it's true, but you can set it to false, which will prevent empty edits to be committed (leaving existing null, NaN, empty string, and undefined values as-is if the cell enters edit mode but no new value is entered).

Breaking Changes

Due to Google’s decision to deprecate their Google Signin Library, we are deprecating our wijmo.cloud.OAuth2 class. Existing apps won’t break! But read more about our announcement and recommendations.
To improve accessibility, we moved [wj-part='ch'] (which contains column headers) before data rows in element normally has aria-hidden, but if headersFocusability is set, aria-hidden will be removed. It is possible that this change could impact CSS selectors that customers have written, but not likely.

Ready to Check it Out? Download Wijmo Today!