Wijmo | JavaScript UI Controls: 2018 V1 Release

Wijmo | JavaScript UI Controls: 2018 V1 Release

Posted on 4/19/2018 8:03:12 PM

Wijmo’s first major release of 2018 has landed, and it includes new licensing, new controls, and new React support.

We've implemented a new licensing mechanism in Wijmo when you deploy to a server. You'll now need to create a distribution key for applications that use Wijmo. A distribution key authorizes your application to use Wijmo. You can generate a distribution key using your account on our website. To make a distribution key, add the domains that need to be authorized, generate the key, and apply the key to your application. Wijmo licensing will not need a distribution key when on localhost, so your development process will go uninterrupted. You only need to generate and apply a distribution distribution key when you're deploying your application to a server.

To use Wijmo in production, follow these simple steps:
1. Purchase a copy of Wijmo, and register your serial number on our website.
2. Create a deployment distribution key using our website.
3. Apply the deployment distribution key to your application using Wijmo's setlicenseKey method:

Example: wijmo.setlicenseKey(key); Note: We used to release two editions of Wijmo, one for evaluation and one for production. We now have a single edition that runs in two modes (eval or production), so you no longer have to replace Wijmo files when going to production.

The biggest benefit from adding our new licensing mechanism is that we now have a single distribution and can publish it to NPM! We've all waited a long time for this, and we're happy to finally publish Wijmo on NPM.

We've published NpmImages ourselves for years. All our Angular v5 samples used these to install Wijmo as modules from our own server, and we also had documentation that instructed you to install Wijmo from the local file system. The great news is that if you copied either pattern, you can easily move to NPM.

Another big request has been to add a tab control. As usual, when we hear common requests, we add them to our roadmap, and we now have a no-frills TabPanel control.

One nice benefit of our TabPanel is that it's smart: it refreshes Wijmo controls when the tabs become visible. Because controls need to be visible on the screen when they're rendered (for calculating dimensions), other tab controls force you to refresh our controls manually. So this is a nice feature for customers using our TabPanel with embedded Wijmo controls (like FlexGrid).

Another nice benefit of having our own tab control is that we removed Bootstrap tabs from all our samples, and thus completely removed jQuery from all samples.

Wijmo OLAP is even more powerful now that it can connect directly to Microsoft SSAS Cubes. Previously, Wijmo OLAP could handle client-side aggregation so that it didn’t require a server. We also had an option for server-side aggregation, but it required installing a custom DataEngine.

Now, Wijmo OLAP can talk directly to SSAS Cubes. This is great for those of you who have existing SSAS cubes and want to create a PivotGrid (and PivotChart) bound directly to the cube.

This feature requires that you configure a few things in your SSAS Cube to make sure it's accessible via AJAX requests. Read our blog on how to setup Wijmo OLAP and SSAS cubes.

Wijmo has a modern client-side ReportViewer control that now supports ActiveReports. The Wijmo ReportViewer is written as a control in TypeScript and comes with built-in support for Angular, React, Vue and more. It's also provided in multiple module formats for use with module loaders. This cutting-edge ReportViewer complements a cutting-edge report engine.

We worked closely with one of our customers to add Table support to FlexSheet. Tables in FlexSheet act similarly to Excel; you can select a range of cells in a sheet and convert them to a formatted table.

We've added child component support for controls with complex properties: for example, FlexGridColumn for FlexGrid Column objects and FlexChartSeries for Chart Series objects. This makes declaring controls and bindings in markup even more powerful.

Moving forward, all new versions of Wijmo will be published to a new CDN that supports HTTPS. HTTPS is becoming the standard for hosting almost all web content, so we wanted to make sure you can host your applications on HTTPS and still use Wijmo. It also makes Wijmo easier to use on sites like jsfiddle, codepen, jsbin, etc.