Product Release 29 November 2020

Export: Microsoft Excel and RDF

Not a secret, we’ve been working for quite some time on MS Excel (.xlsx) support. And it was quite a mountain to climb: performance, format, integrity. We’ve finally reached a quality level to make this export method available to everyone now. Simply select the “Spreadsheet” option from the available export methods.

Compared to the latter, supporting RDF as an export was way smoother to achieve. As you may know, Coreon GmbH received earlier this year a funding from the European Language Grid – project name MKS2LLOD – with the objective to develop a SPARQL interface to Coreon. And the first aspect of this was to go through the exercise how to model Coreon data in RDF format. A tangible outcome of this is now an exporter into these RDF syntaxes (there are some in: RDF/XML, Turtle, N3, JSON, JSON-LD …)

Editing: Multi-Select Picklist Values

A change that we had announced last time simplifies the editing of multi-select picklist properties and flagset options. We know that – when you have many options configured, say > 10+ options or more to select from – in these circumstances the wrapping and the UX for selecting / changing the values was not too user friendly. We have now replaced the previous approach (namely dozens of check-boxes) with another control, based on the so-called select2.org module. This is a very usable approach for web browser UIs to select several values from a long list of options.

How does it work? You either select from a list of options (like a dropdown-list) or when familiar with the names of the options you simple start typing one or more letters that occur in the option label, and the UI automatically suggests the available options to quickly choose from.

Image Cards

The thumbnail preview of images was up to now based on squares, cropped versions of the original image. While this guaranteed a very consistent presentation there was a trade-off: The cropping sometimes caused that some important pieces of the image were not visible in the thumbnail. Particularly when the ratio of the image was far away from a square, namely very vertical / portrait-like or very horizontal / landscape-like.

We’ve changed the behavior now to respect the original ratio in the thumbnail and to render the whole content of the original image. Beta users confirmed that this is a good move.

Since we were already working on these image cards, we’ve also improved further details such as support for many selected options in a flagset, as well as a more horizontally aligned layout.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Save button is now positioned now to the left: While the new editing module was welcome by many users, one criticism we’ve received was that the “Save” button is so far away (namely on the bottom right of the browser). We’ve researched a bit further also how others are resolving this, and moved now the button closer to where you usually edit, namely to the left of the screen.
  This is probably a very noticeable change. During the beta we all got very fast used to it, and hope you will, too.
• Editing multi-line text properties with already quite many lines of content in. This is now more comfortable by sizing the editing box based on the amount of the already existing text content.
• Mandatory single select picklist: When editing a concept where such a property was not yet present (maybe via import), then its value looked like saved, but was not. This has been improved. The dropdown box now warns sharply that this is a mandatory
• property with the default value suggested.
• When adding a new concept the terms and their properties are now better aligned.
• And a slightly enhanced Coreon Schema (due to the image card thumbnail changes) – reach it here: www.coreon.com/schema/2020-11/coreon.xsd

And of course some bug fixes …

• While adding a concept and adding a text property several times, then only the last value is visible, whereas the other just added ones are not clickable. This has been fixed.
• Long language drop-down box runs out of view. This has been fixed.
• Delete concept when in small widget mode, then the button to delete is not visible. This has been fixed.
• Error message shown when deleting a concept. This has been fixed.
• Drag ‘n Drop a concept from the clipboard to the map with the intent to create an alias, then the preview of the pending alias is wrong. This has been fixed.
• Markdown preview not applied in multiline text properties. This has been fixed.
• Search card: Rendering of single select picklist value was garbled. This has been fixed.
• Fixed rendering of system info values when in edit mode.
• Export, dashboard: apply one or more filters is not taken into account during the export process. This has been fixed.