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, as well as added the ability to exclude UDFs from the search screen entirely.
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. Its visual flow is much-improved, and it even supports removing UDFs that are irrelevant to your search. 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.
- Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) - 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).
