We're releasing Issuetrak 17.2 just a little bit after Thanksgiving break! 17.2 is a quality of life release, with a massive overhaul under the hood to improve issue performance, as well as a few nice tweaks and some bug fixes.
Let's talk about that "massive overhaul" mentioned above. The tl;dr here is that Issue-related screens (view, edit, submit, and a few more) should now be quicker to load.
Here's the longer explanation: The way Issuetrak has worked up to this release, issue-related screens would trigger a fair amount of work between the web and SQL servers to determine permissions and visibility controls for the current user. We weren't happy with that, as it's an inefficient approach, and doesn't scale very well for large sites with a lot of busy users! With that in mind, our Dev team worked on a lighter approach that would result in less work for the servers and a snappier user experience. We've been testing this release internally for several weeks, and we think we've achieved that goal!
The next area we've put some work into was the Issue Search screen. We're making better use of screen real estate. We've lined fields up and made it overall easier on the eyes.
You may be aware that you can relabel various features in Issuetrak. A few features that are examples of this include the Knowledge Base, Locations, and Organizations. We've added Billing to the list. Now you can relabel the Billing module to whatever you want!
Organizations have seen a small change, as well as new additions: The "Contact User" field has been renamed to "Primary Contact User", and two new fields have been added: "Secondary Contact User" and "Tertiary Contact User".
Rounding out the release, we have several bug fixes, which includes two security vulnerabilities submitted to us.
Issue Performance
Issuetrak's performance relating to the issue screens has been vastly sped up! We've seen faster loading times everywhere that issue visibility permissions are used (which is a lot of places)!
Billing Module
The Billing module has been updated so that it can be given a custom label. Now you can call the Billing module whatever you want!
Issue Search
We've redesigned the Issue Search screen and improved its visual flow. See it for yourself in our live preview site!
Organizations
Organization records now have a little more room for you to add points of contact. "Contact User" has been renamed to "Primary Contact User". The two new fields are "Secondary Contact User" and "Tertiary Contact User".
Database Schema
The Issuetrak schema has seen very large behind-the-scenes updates due to schema changes, and these affect the API and API v2 to some extent. We've taken great pains to ensure that existing code continues to work, though! Check out the updated database schema here.
System Requirements
Issuetrak takes advantage of several features that are only provided by SQL Server 2016 and higher. Accordingly, we have changed the deployment tools to check that SQL 2016 or higher is installed, and to prevent deployment if this condition is not met.
API
When viewing paged results from the API's Users endpoint, it would always return the results from the first page, regardless of the page number requested.
Attachments
Users would have trouble loading issues that contained attachments that were over 1 gigabyte in size. Issue load times for these scenarios should be noticeably improved.
Global Issues
We accidentally introduced a bug with closing Global Issues when we fixed another bug dealing with tasks in a recent release.
Identity Management
When an administrator went to edit an existing AD Federation Services mapping, it would default the "Exact Match" toggle to Yes, even if it previously was set to No.
Issue Search
Users would encounter a 500 error when they conducted an Issue Search with the "Output Type" set to Detail List with Notes.
Organizations
Organization names would not properly display characters with macrons, and would instead display improperly encoded HTML.
Security Improvements
We were alerted to two security vulnerabilities in the product:
- HTML Injection - It was possible for an attacker to add HTML to an issue that could be used to phish users, display misinformation, or otherwise collect data.
- Input Data Manipulation - This allowed an attacker to manipulate on-page HTML to change the submitter when the issue was submitted.
Tasks
- Task notes could go beyond the allotted character limit for the field under certain conditions. This would result in future interactions with that task displaying a 500 error.
- It would take a long time to submit an issue with a lot of tasks and Outgoing Email enabled.
Time Zones
- Our information was out of date for New Zealand's GMT+12:00 (Auckland, Wellington) time zone, resulting in customers with that time zone setting observing timestamps being off by one hour in their sites.
- We've made an additional change associated with time zones: We will now display the full timestamp and date, as well as a note indicating what time zone the timestamp applies to, in escalation notice emails sent from each Issuetrak site (if Outgoing Email is enabled).
release date: 12.10.2024
Asset Management
The error "Required date can not be before check-out date" would appear on sites using Asset Management if a user tried to check out an asset from the Edit Asset screen, while a checkout date in November 2024 and a return date of January 2025 were selected.
Custom Reports
Custom reports that were set to use a count of issues (or any value) and spanned multiple pages would see an incorrect count quantity at the end. The sum was incorrectly being calculated based only on the number of results on the last page.
Entities
If a group had membership in multiple organizations, and an administrator tried to remove one of those memberships, an error would appear.
Visibility Restrictions
While maintaining restrictions on Issue Types, if an administrator was removing organizations, there was a discrepancy between the organization an administrator was trying to interact with, and the one that was actually removed in sites that contained over 100 organizations.
release date: 12.17.2024
Close Issue
Some issues would erroneously be triggered to close when a note was added to them.
Custom Reports
Custom reports that utilized the "Issues/Available Tasks" data set would display a 500 error when Task Assignee related fields were selected as fields in the report.
