January 2025

UI & Usability Improvements

  • Added a shortcut to GenioHub on the project dashboard for seamless navigation between a project and GenioHub.
  • Added Description and Mandatory columns to the variables list.
  • Added an HTML text editor to support longer text content.
  • Added a Translations button next to the titles, labels, messages to quickly create multilingual text entries.

Metadata Sets

Introduced Metadata Sets, a simplified mechanism for defining reusable groups of fields. Users can create a predefined set of fields once and import it into multiple tables as needed, improving consistency, reducing repetitive configuration and simplifying maintenance.

Version Control in Genio Hub

Genio Hub now offers full version control, bringing a web-based GenioSVN-like experience directly to your browser. Users can create branches, integrate changes, and manage conflicts without leaving the platform. Branches can follow either trunk-based workflows for lightweight continuous delivery or feature-based workflows for structured release management with external code reviews. Teams can adopt the workflow that best suits their release cycle and deployment strategy.

Operations

  • Integrate – Similar to a commit merge: integrates the changes from your branch into the source branch, ensuring your work is incorporated without losing updates from others.
  • Update – Pulls new changes from the source branch into your current branch, keeping your branch synchronized with the latest project updates.
  • Commit – Saves changes from the branch database into the Git repository, making modifications permanent and trackable.
  • Pull – Updates the branch database with any new commits from the Git repository, ensuring your branch reflects the repository state.
  • Show Changes – Displays differences between the branch database and the corresponding Git branch, allowing users to review modifications before committing or integrating.
  • Log – Provides a full history of changes in the Git repository, helping track who made what changes and when.
  • Revert – Creates a new commit that undoes the changes introduced by a specific commit, preserving history while correcting errors.
  • Discard – Reverts your branch database to the current Git repository state, removing any uncommitted changes safely.

This update empowers teams with smarter conflict resolution, enhanced branch management, and detailed change tracking, providing full control over collaborative development and project versioning.

Kanban

Introduced Kanban, a structured system for managing items and their states, improving real-time visualization of workflow and enhancing decision-making efficiency.
Users can add items directly to the board, placing them in the appropriate column to represent their current state. Moving items between states is simple with drag-and-drop functionality, reflecting progress or status changes instantly. Key information, such as deadlines, status, and assigned team members, can be tracked in real-time, enabling faster and more efficient management without navigating between individual records.

Multi-format Reports

Reports can now support multiple export formats simultaneously (PDF, Excel, Word, RTF, Report Viewer). For Vue generations, formats are configured through a property list in the report menu, allowing more than one format to be selected. If multiple formats are chosen, users select the desired format from a popup at download time; if only one is selected, the report downloads automatically as before. MVC and QWeb also use the new property list, with only the first selected format applied. Manual report definitions continue to override configured formats.

Static Filters

Static filter logic was refactored to separate Filters and Filter Conditions into two tables. Instead of grouping filters, multiple conditions are now associated with a single filter. This simplifies static filter configuration in lists and prepares the foundation for future filter types (e.g., field- or enumeration-based filters). Filters now require ID and View Mode (Checkbox for multi-select, Radio Button for single-select), while expressions are defined at the condition level. Existing applications remain unchanged due to an automatic migration routine. For new filters, condition formulas define filter values and condition order controls their display order.

AI Capabilities

GenioBot Updates

Introduced new user-centered features and performance insights to enhance the ChatBot experience. The system now supports image uploads, feedback buttons (thumbs up/down with optional comments), and copy-to-clipboard functionality. It uses an agent-based architecture with specialized agents for documentation, image processing, and orchestration. Performance metrics and user feedback are tracked through the Langfuse framework, capturing model cost and execution time. These updates improve user engagement, enable continuous performance monitoring, and strengthen data collection for ongoing optimization.

Issue Helper with GPT

This feature introduces AI-powered assistance for internal ticket submission, helping reduce errors and missing information. When enabled for a program, a Validate button appears on the ticket form. Clicking it triggers GPT to analyze the ticket content in real time, providing instant suggestions for missing details, correcting program or impact selections, and guiding the user to submit more accurate tickets. This improves ticket accuracy, saves time, provides user guidance, and enhances overall operational efficiency.

Lists with Columns from the Below Table

This update enables displaying multiple values from related tables directly in a list, improving readability and usability. A new option in the column definition for menu lists, forms, and global lists allows selecting a "below table." The server executes one additional query per table to load the related records and automatically removes empty values. This feature allows users to display multiple values in a single column without concatenating rows, provides individual tooltips for values exceeding visible limits, supports filtering by distinct values, and offers a cleaner, more visually appealing presentation.

OpenTelemetry Support

Genio applications now collect performance metrics using OpenTelemetry, enabling monitoring of form/menu load times, routine execution durations, and login activity. The application sends telemetry data via OTLP to a Collector, which processes and forwards it to configured backends. Data is aggregated in-app to reduce volume, then visualized in Grafana dashboards where charts can show sums, averages, and counts. Collected metrics include form load time, menu load time, routine execution time, login attempts, as well as internal .NET Core metrics like request/response time and hardware usage, providing actionable insights to optimize application performance.

SQL Server Update

Genio has updated SQL Server support to simplify version handling and adopt modern database features. Database types were consolidated into SQL Server (Latest), representing 2022 or higher, and SQL Server Compatibility, representing 2012 or higher. All intermediate SQL Server versions were removed from the codebase. Existing configurations default to Compatibility, while adopting the Latest version must be done manually in Genio or WebAdmin. The update also introduces new SQL features for improved performance and maintainability. STRING_AGG is now used for string aggregation, delivering up to a 10x speed improvement and a much simpler syntax. Paging queries now use OFFSET…LIMIT instead of ROW_NUMBER, offering minor performance gains, clearer syntax, and easier future optimization by Microsoft.

Other Important Updates

  • Formula propagation in C# GenioServer was optimized: formulas are now batched and calculated together, improving efficiency compared to updating each formula type separately.