Release Notes for XWiki 4.3 Milestone 2

Version 37.1 by Thomas Mortagne on 2012/11/12

This is the release notes for XWiki Platform, XWiki Enterprise and XWiki Enterprise Manager. They share the same release notes as they are released together and have the same version.

<insert description of release here>

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki 4.3 Milestone 1)

Experimental Solr based search engine

A new and experimental search engine based on Apache Solr is now available.

The new search UI offers advanced search features and results highlighting. Future versions will also include Faceted Search.

solrSearchFilters.png

The new engine has it's own index, separate from the Lucene one, which is stored by default in the <permanent directory>/solr folder. In the same folder you can also access Solr's configuration files together with the index's schema.xml which you can tweek to achieve better results. To change this folder's location, you can either pass the -Dsolr.solr.home system property when you start the application container (tomcat/jetty/etc.) or you can set the search.solr.home property in WEB-INF/xwiki.preferences.

For now, indexing is done only manually by using the Search Administration UI. Because of this, in order to get any search results, you have to go to Administration > Applications > Search and index/reindex the wiki. Any changes in the content of the wiki will not be searchable until you manually reindex. This limitation will be removed in future versions, once the feature matures.

solrSearchAdmin.png

This new search engine is not enable by default, since Lucene is still the default one, but, if you wish to try it out, it can be enable by going to Administration > Applications > Search > Search engine to use and selecting Solr (Experimental).

Default date picker

The date picker from AppWithinMinutes is now the default picker for all XClass properties of type Date. This means that you'll get a date picker when editing an object with a Date property even if you didn't use AppWithinMinutes to create the XClass.

DatePicker.png

If for some reason you don't want to use the new date picker then you can edit the XClass and uncheck "Use Date Picker" for the Date property.

User and Group picker

We added a user and group picker that is used by default for all XClass properties of type "List of Users" and "List of Groups". When multiple selection is enabled, each selected user is added to the list above the picker. You can remove individual users from the list of selected users or you can clear the entire list.

userPicker-editMultiple.png

In single selection mode whenever you select an user it overwrites the previously selected user.

userPicker-editSingle-objectEditor.png

The list of selected users is displayed in view mode in a similar way. For each user there is a link to their profile page.

userPicker-viewMultiple.png

The group picker behaves in the same way. The group alias is the name of the group document, the group name is the title of the group document while the group avatar is the first image attached to the group document.

groupPicker-editMultiple.png

The user and group picker can be configured to display a scope toggle that can be used to switch between local and global user/group suggestions.

userPicker-scope.png

You can check this if you edit a group from a subwiki (in a multiwiki environment).

groupSheet-edit.png

Miscellaneous

  • Search Admin UI improvements ():

    searchAdminUINew.png

  • Automatically register translations for the FAQ and IRCBot applications

See the full list of JIRA issues fixed in this release.

For Developers

New Localization Module

A new localization module has been introduced to replace the old XWikiMessageTool.

See Localization Module for more details.

REST API Improvements

Some improvements have been done to the REST API with respect to wiki management.

  • XARs can be imported in Wikis by POSTing it to the /wikis/{wikiName}
  • New wikis can be created using the /wikimanager resource. (This resource is only available with XWiki Enterprise Manager)

For more information see XWiki RESTful API

In addition there was an XWiki REST API refactoring done with the introduction of a new xwiki-platform-rest-api module containing all resource declarations. This is important for client and modules willing to use the REST API so that they can have all the information about resources using Java annotation. See XWiki RESTful API.

Execution context property declarations

Execution context properties can now be associated with various metadata attributes.  See the documentation on the execution context for more information.

New Scope property for wiki components and UI extensions

A scope can now be defined for wiki components and UI extensions, it allows to restrict for which wiki(s) or which user they will be available:

  • Current Wiki, the component/UI extension will be available in the current wiki
  • Global, the component/UI extension will be available in all the wikis (wiki farms)
  • Current User, the component/UI extension will only be available for its author 

Deprecated and Retired projects

<description of deprecated and retired projects>

Upgrades

The following dependencies have been upgraded:

Miscellaneous

<other dev stuff to add and link to JIRA for all issues fixed>

  • Fixed a bug about incorrect results in multi-wiki lucene search in the REST API.
  • Add a java.util.Locale converter which allow:
    • using Locale in rendering macro parameters
    • support Java method with Locale parameter(s) in Velocity

Translations

The following translations have been updated: 

Known issues

Backward Compatibility and Migration Notes

General Notes

You may also want to import the default wiki XAR in order to benefit from all the improvements listed above.

Always make sure you compare your xwiki.cfg and xwiki.properties files with the newest version since some configuration parameters were added. Note that you should add xwiki.store.migration=1 so that XWiki will attempt to automatically migrate your current database to the new schema. Make sure you backup your Database before doing anything.

Issues specific to XWiki 4.3 Milestone 2

  • The methods setUrlPatternMatcher and getUrlPatternMatcher have been removed from the core class com.xpn.xwiki.XWiki.  The underlying URLPatternMatcher could not really be used as a singleton instance and was causing irregular failures in the basic authentication method.  Thus these methods cannot be meaningfully relied upon and have therefore been removed.
  • When setting the value using setValue (or setList) on a list field in an XWiki object, the list will now be copied.  To be able to update the list, you must call getValue (or getList) and update the returned list.  This is due to .

API Breakages

The following APIs were modified since <project> <version - 1>:

<clirr output here>

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