Transact Maestro 17.10

Overview

Transact Maestro 17.10 is a major release of Maestro with significant features as well as bug fixes.

For more information, please see the official Transact Maestro Documentation.

What's New

The 17.10 release introduces features and tooling to allow developers more flexibility in their approach to using Maestro and fitting in with their own development practices.

Support has been added to allow the use of Source Code Management tools such as GIT to manage Maestro assets.

Component IDs have undergone a major change making them first-class citizens as well as introducing several tools and views to manage and display impacts when they are changed.

Versioning of Maestro design assets (forms, components, and templates) now supports Semantic versioning up to 3 levels.

Maestro retains compatibility mode which means designs are not automatically upgraded to 17.10. An organization can choose when to upgrade the project and the designs it contains.

Key Features

Source Management Control (SCM)

This release augments collaborative team development by connecting Maestro to source code management (SCM) tools. You can confidently use SCM techniques like automation, code reviews, branching, and merging in your source code management tool while receiving the extended benefits of the Transact platform. Maestro supports using GIT, or other SCM tools, to manage Maestro project content and package code for you to use in GIT. We have also removed the need to manage more than one source repository. Use your standard development practices and tools while receiving the extended benefits from the Transact platform. 

New Maestro ID Management

Users of previous versions of Maestro will notice a change in working with the ID property. The first noticeable change is that the ID property has been moved from the Data panel to the Properties panel. Moving the ID property has made it more prominent and allows for it to be a required change when a new component is added to the form.

The intention here is to make the component's ID a first-class citizen where the developer can have greater control of the ID naming and use the supplied tools to manage the IDs. Benefits of this approach are:

• Reduce ID churn - Previously the auto-id generation of Maestro IDs was based on the label name. If the label name was modified the ID would automatically change as well. This would trigger refactoring processes to automatically change references to the element. This was not always desirable especially in instances where IDs needed to remain static such as in testing scripts. It was also difficult to follow impacts when changes were made. In 17.10 we have flipped the logic where the ID is not driven by the label. Refactoring may still occur, however a developer can now review the changes via the new impact analysis dialog and choose to accept the changes or not.
• Allow the ability to add context to the application - Previously element IDs had little context to the entity they belonged to. This was causing issues with Transact Insights and with understanding the data model. 17.10 introduces the concept of data entities that can be created easily and managed in the tool.

Reduce duplication of IDs across templates, components, and forms by making the ID more unique.

For more information, view the Understanding the Component ID section of the documentation.

Semantic Versioning

This release unifies versioning across the platform for consistency including full semantic versioning across all Maestro design assets. It enables two teams to work in parallel on more than one form solution and permits hierarchical management of versions. Additional features include support for up to 3 levels of versions and version tagging and branching.

For more information view the Form Versions section of the documentation.

Compatibility Mode for Maestro Designs continued support

Maestro continues to support Compatibility mode in the 17.10 release. This means 3 versions will be supported in the product 17.10, 5.1 and 5.0

The compatibility mode feature allows organizations to choose when they want to upgrade their design projects to the new major version. When 17.10 is released, projects will not be automatically upgraded, development can continue using the release version used prior to the upgrade, ensuring there is no change to the behavior of their forms.

Our recommendation for upgrading a project is to copy the project via an export/import and upgrade the copy. This allows a switch back to the older version backup if required.

Compatibility mode is only applied to the design view (editing forms, components, templates). The dashboard view (organizations, projects etc) always uses the latest release version.

For more information view the Compatibility Mode section of the documentation.

Changes to existing functionality

There are some changes in behavior that Maestro users need to be aware of.

Import Function:

The structure of file exports has changed in 17.10 to support Source Code Management. This does mean that any project exports from a 5.1 environment will not import using the "Import Project". If required, these legacy projects can be imported on request via a Maestro administrator using the "Import legacy Project" button (see screenshot below).

Compatibility with older versions of Transact Manager

Forms created in the Maestro 17.10 environment are fully compatible with older versions of Transact Manager. Some functionality is not available in the older Transact Manager versions, items not supported will be highlighted when the Form Archive Package is imported into the older version of TM. These will just be warnings.

Release Details