Apostrophe 3.42.0 Schema field UI improvements, per-document permission, and improvements/fixes

[BoDonkey]

Howdy from Apostrophe Central!

Per-document permission with new inline array options and relationship suggestions

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The big feature of this release is an update to the enterprise @apostrophecms-pro/advanced-permission module. Permissions are more granular with the ability to modify the permissions of the individual page and piece documents. Permissions can easily be set for users or groups on each document. You can also easily duplicate permissions between parent and sub-pages.

In developing this module, we also improved the core array and relationship schema fields to make your UI look even slicker. You can now choose to output your array fields as a table, rather than an accordion, and add a label and icon to your empty inline array. The relationship field has a new suggestion UI that pre-populates with recent items for editor selection. A relationship field within an inline array? Ooh, la la!

We’ve also added a few little touches that make it easier for developers to inject new buttons into Apostrophe’s piece manager dialog box, and also launch the editing experience for any page or piece programmatically.

We are starting to show a nice uptick in open-source development community input. This release has an update to the piece-type-importer module by justyna13 and justynalodzinska. Thanks! This module helps you to populate and migrate pieces from CSV files. We encourage developers of all skill levels to contribute. Come by the Discord server and check out our open-source-contributions and open-source-talk channels.

Our engineers are moving forward over these next cycles on per-locale permissions and putting together a new system for offering page templates. As always, we are interested in your feedback. Please visit our Productboard to cast your vote on what features we should prioritize or consider!

Until next time remember that in software development, optimism is great, but Cypress tests are better!

Apostrophe 3.42.0

Adds

• You can now set style: table on inline arrays. It will display the array as a regular HTML table instead of an accordion.
  See the array field documentation for more information.
• You can now set draggable: false on inline arrays. It will disable the drag-and-drop feature. Useful when the order is not significant.
  See the array field documentation for more information.
• You can now set the label and icon to display on inline arrays when they are empty.
  See the array field documentation for more information.
• We have added a new and improved suggestion UI to relationship fields.
• The utilityOperations feature of piece types now supports additional properties:
  relationship: true (show the operation only when editing a relationship), relationship: false (never show
  the operation when editing a relationship), button: true, icon and iconOnly: true.
  When button: true is specified, the operation appears as a standalone button rather than
  being tucked away in the "more" menu.
• In addition, utilityOperations can now specify eventOptions with an event subproperty
  instead of modalOptions. This is useful with the new edit event (see below).
• Those extending our admin UI on the front end can now open a modal to create or edit a page or piece by calling
  await apos.doc.edit({ type: 'article' }) (the type here is an example). To edit an existing document add an
  _id property. To copy an existing document (like our "duplicate" feature) add a copyOf
  property. When creating new pages, type can be sent to @apostrophecms/page for convenience
  (note that the type property does not override the default or current page type in the editor).
• The edit Apostrophe event is now available and takes an object with the same properties
  as above. This is useful when configuring utilityOperations.
• The content-changed Apostrophe event can now be emitted with a select: true property. If a
  document manager for the relevant content type is open, it will attempt to add the document to the
  current selection. Currently this works best with newly inserted documents.
• Localized strings in the admin UI can now use $t(key) to localize a string inside
  an interpolated variable. This was accomplished by setting skipOnVariables to false
  for i18next, solely on the front end for admin UI purposes.
• The syntax of the method defined for dynamic choices now accepts a module prefix to get the method from, and the () suffix.
  This has been done for consistency with the external conditions syntax shipped in the previous release. See the documentation for more information.
• Added the viewPermission property of schema fields, and renamed permission to editPermission (with backwards
  compatibility) for clarity. You can now decide if a schema field requires permissions to be visible or editable.
  See the documentation for more information.

Fixes

• Do not log unnecessary "required" errors for hidden fields.
• Fixed a bug that prevented "Text Align" from working properly in the rich text editor in certain cases.
• Fix typo in @apostrophecms/doc-type and @apostrophecms/submitted-drafts where we were using canCreate instead of showCreate to display the Create New button or showing the Copy button in Manager modals.
• Send external condition results in an object so that numbers are supported as returned values.

Apostrophe 2.227.0

Adds

• Add a read-only overlay to prevent users from interacting with areas set as read-only, as it was done for checkboxes and color field types.

Apostrophe 3.x modules

@apostrophecms/piece-type-importer 1.1.0

This module adds an optional import feature to all piece type modules in an Apostrophe project. This feature enables importing pieces from CSV files where it is configured.

Adds

• Add support for rich-text(HTML) import. Thanks to justyna13 and justynalodzinska for this contribution.

Enterprise modules

@apostrophecms-pro/advanced-permission 1.3.0

This module provides more granular control over content permission. It allows the creation of custom groups with proscribed abilities and the ability to assign users to as few or as many groups as desired. Contact us or visit our new pricing page to learn more.

Adds

• Add per-document permissions. You can now set per-document permissions on a page or a piece.

Utilities

@apostrophecms/content-upgrader 1.0.0

A tool to migrate your content from Apostrophe 2.x to Apostrophe 3.x. That is, it creates a new database in the A3 format, and copies over the uploaded media. This tool does not upgrade your source code.

Changes

• Declared stable. No code changes.
• Decision made to start official releases with 1.0.0 for consistency.

@apostrophecms/code-upgrader 1.0.0

The Code Upgrader handles a portion of the required modifications for an Apostrophe 2 (A2) codebase to run Apostrophe 3 (A3). It will also identify many specific lines and sections of code that a developer will need to convert manually.

Changes

• Declared stable. No code changes.