16-August-2016: This is a critical bug fix release to remedy ongoing performance and reliability problems with the Scheduler and Delay workflows.
There are some important details to understand about this update, so please take a few minutes to read these release notes.
There are numerous other smaller fixes and additions as well. Few if any of these changes rely on Javascript so there should not be a need to dump browser cache.
P270 – Reimplemented Scheduler and Delay Workflows
These workflows have (forever?) had reliability problems. For the longest time, Phil was the only one that reported it and while I could see it was real, I could never reproduce it. With a lot more use, I now see the problem nearly every day. This release a wholesale rewrite of both features to bypass the underlying performance issue that created the bad behavior.
This update does not replace your existing workflows – those will continue to operate (as well or as badly) as they ever did. New Scheduler and Delay workflows will be recognizable by a change in color of the workflow rule icon. To change from an old scheduler to a new scheduler, you must delete the old one and create a new one in its place.
If (and only if) the total count of your Schedulers and Delays exceeds 20, then you may contact support and I will run a converter on your instance that will change all old Schedulers and Delays to the new implementation. This takes a while so don’t ask if you have only a couple dozen – it will waste both your time and mine as your instance will be unusable during the conversion.
If you have 20 or fewer workflows to change, it will be faster and less disruptive for you to do it by hand and I expect to be pretty backlogged so I make no promises about when I can do the conversion.
And in case you are wondering, yes, I can and will count your workflows before putting you on the conversion list. 🙂
If you are running one Persona and using our reference workflows, consisting of Short Abstract, Rich Summary, Social Amplifier, and Repeater, you’ll have about a dozen rules to convert. Some of you I know have way more than this – just email support and I’ll get you converted as soon as I can.
In all cases, newly created Delays and Schedulers will use the new implementation – it’s not even possible for you to start an old one.
P268 – Editing and Deleting Schedulers and Delays is slow and often fails
This is fixed by P270. Now they’re the fastest!
P267 – Long delays fire too soon
This was a classic programming goof – pretty much our own version of Y2K: the delay time was stored in a 5 byte integer. Given the timing resolution used, the max delay time was a bit over 2o days. Longer delays overflowed and therefore became smaller delays. Unlike Y2K, our rollover was a problem. This is now fixed by project P270.
P255 – Run Workflows button was failing for Script workflows
You should only ever see a file in a folder running a Script workflow if there is (i) a problem with the script or (ii) a problem with a workflow on the output folder. In either case, fix the problem and press the “run workflows” button to reapply the workflow rule to the documents in the folder. That was not working for Scripts – now it is.
P254 – Add description meta-data to Feed folders
Most folders and documents have a description field. It was missing from Feed folders. Now it isn’t. It’s a useful place for me to put new user instructions. You might find a similar use as well.
P263 – Fix Script edit behavior on Script workflow dialog
When using “Edit Content” on the Script workflow dialog to edit the referenced script, the script selection control changed and caused a bad reference. Probably never happened to you – now it certainly won’t.
P269 – Misc. UI fixes
A bunch of small fixes to things that keep bothering me.
- In the item list on task dialogs remove the ‘copy’ and ‘move’ options.
- Put Venue type icon next to Venue folder on Venues page. That way, user can see at a glance what kind of venue it is, and it looks pretty too. 🙂
- Fix several spelling issues on the TextBroker workflow dialog
- Sort the Facdbook page list alphabetically in the “Set Page” menu in credentials
- Remove the “Delete Workflows” button in the document library view
- Remove the “Start Workflow” option from the “Selected Items” menu
- Add a “Delete Workflows” option to the “Selected Items” menu. This gives us what the old button does now (by selecting all) plus the ability to delete just a selection of workflows rather than doing them one at a time.
P240 – Make the Feedback field optional when editing the result on the TW task
The feedback – which is optionally provided by the Turker – was incorrectly made required in the worker step of the TW workflow. Now it is not.
P257 – Automate Reauthorization of the HubSpot Credentials
The OAuth2 creds for HS only last a few hours. We now automatically keep them alive.
P274 – In some cases valid WordPress Credentials fail
This happens for some HTTPS connections because of an incomplete list of Certificate Authorities. We now “trust everyone” [like how are you going to hurt me with RSS??].
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