L2023.2 Release Notes

For a list of release dates and Sisense's end of support schedule, see Sisense Life Cycle.

Privacy and Security Information

This release contains several security related updates. We highly recommend upgrading to this latest release to take advantage of any security-related updates and benefit from the Sisense support and warranty. In addition, Sisense strongly recommends regularly testing and auditing your environment after upgrading, and periodically during your subscription term, to ensure all privacy and security settings remain in place.

Customers are responsible for controlling and monitoring your environments and are therefore in the best position to ensure the correct security settings are in place for how you use Sisense products.

Due to the complexity of Sisense products, we strongly suggest that all customers ensure that you understand how all of the privacy and security settings within Sisense work.

If you use Sisense to store/process sensitive data, it is your responsibility to review and test your implementation to ensure you are not inadvertently sharing data with unauthorized third parties. For more information on data security rules, see Data Access Security.

BREAKING CHANGES - WARNING!

The following is a cumulative list of potentially breaking changes from approximately the past 12 months, and may also include warnings about upcoming changes:

Analytical Engine Overview: For L2022.9 and later, if a column name has been renamed in the data model, where the previous name was linked to a filter, the filter will report an error of a dimension not found. To fix this, delete the relevant filter and recreate it using the updated column name specified in the data model.
The signature of the widget.changesMade() function was changed for L2022.9. This may cause breaking changes in custom scripts or plugins where it is used. All places using widget.changesMade() or widget.changesMade('someEvent') should be changed to widget.changesMade('someEvent', ['metadata', 'properties_changed']).
The Databricks JDBC driver was updated to version 2.6.29 for L2022.9. After upgrading the driver, the connection string requires an update from:
jdbc:spark://<Server Hostname>:443;HttpPath=<Http Path>;TransportMode=http;SSL=1[;property=value[;property=value]]
To:
jdbc:databricks://<Server Hostname>:443;HttpPath=<Http Path>[;property=value[;property=value]]
After installing or upgrading to this version, if the connection string in the system is not the required new one, change it to the new one manually.
The Google Adwords native connector is no longer supported because it uses Google APIs that Google deprecated. New installations from 2022.5 and up will no longer contain the Google Adwords native connector. Customers with older versions of Sisense, or who upgrade to 2022.5 or higher can use this workaround: Using Google Ads connector for EC models with CDATA Driver.
As of L2022.9, all API tokens created before L2021.10 must be rotated.

Release Overview

Release L2023.2 provides a number of new features and significant improvements to Sisense for Linux.

What's New

This release contains several new features. The following table lists the high-level impact (or potential impact, if any) of each of these features, and how to handle it if upgrading to this version. Continue reading the Release Notes below the table for a detailed explanation of each feature.

Feature	Issues and Actions to Consider
Notebooks - Notebook embedding and connecting to data sources using shared connections	N/A
Web Access Tokens - New “trc” Claim	N/A

Notebooks

Embedding Notebooks

Notebooks can now be embedded using iFrames making use of parameters and techniques that are used for embedding Dashboards via iFrames. The following URL parameters are supported for Notebooks:

Name	Type	In Notebooks
`embed`	Boolean	Displays the Notebook in embedded mode
`edit`	Boolean	Enables data designers to edit the Notebook The toolbar must be enabled as well
`h`	Boolean	Show/Hide the environment header
`t`	Boolean	Show/Hide the Notebook toolbar
`l`	Boolean	Show/Hide the navigation panel on the left
`r`	Boolean	Show/Hide the filter panel on the right

For more information about the “embed” parameter and the other optional parameters see Embedding Dashboard in an iFrame.

Querying Shared Data Models from Notebooks

Shared connections can now be used to connect Notebooks to data models shared with the user from the Data page.

This means that Notebook users now have 3 options for connecting to data sources:

Connect directly to Live data sources
Connect to ElastiCubes using shared connections
Connect to Live data sources using shared connections

See Connecting Notebooks to a Data Source for more information.

Web Access Tokens

The “trc” claim has been added for tracking the usage data per individual Web Access Tokens, (see Using Web Access Tokens).

To use this capability add the “trc” claim into the token payload with an array of the relevant tracking tags. Doing this will allow you to gather, filter and explore usage analytics data using these tracking tags. See Overview of Usage Analytics for more information.

Example:

"trc": [ "facebook_post", "public" ]

Here is a screenshot showing an example of how the tracking tags appear in a Usage Analytics dashboard filter:

What's Improved

Dynamic Schema Support

Dynamic schema support was added for Athena. See Managing Live Dynamic Connections.

Dashboard Color Palette

The utilization of the color palettes functionality has been improved, (see Changing the Dashboard's Color Palette). Now colors are not stored in the widget objects and are generated from the assigned palette on-the-fly, each time a widget is loaded, unless the user has selected a specific color in the widget.

Changing the palette in the Pivot now resets the previously selected colors, the same as for the rest of the widget types.

When duplicating panel items, like the values displayed in the widgets, the conditional color values will now be preserved, unlike the static and range values, which will be reset and re-generated.

Narratives

The internal Sisense libraries for widget narration were updated and now provide improved performance. Due to these updates there may be minor changes in the narratives returned by the system.

See Using Sisense Narratives for more information.

Embed SDK

The Embed SDK action dashboard.clearFilters is now available for all of the roles and does not depend on the editMode configuration.

Explanations

There are UI improvements to the downloadable images for indicators in Explanations.

Query ElastiCubes from Notebooks

The use of shared connections to connect a Notebook to an ElastiCube and query it using SQL is now enabled by default.

For more information see Connecting Notebooks to a Data Source.

Simply Ask (NLQ)

The setup flow has been improved, such that Simply Ask is enabled by default across all of the data models, giving dashboard designers the option to enable simply ask per dashboard.
Data Security is now fully supported when using Simply Ask.
The Natural Language Understanding of members in filters has been improved, and the column indexing functionality has been removed, making the NLQ model light weight, and scalable for wide use.

Note:

Existing Simply Ask customers that want to enable the new Simply Ask Improvements listed above will need to enable this functionality by calling the nlq/nlqAdvancedMode API by the system Admin.

What's Fixed

Add-ons

Add-on Build Process

Improved add-on stability and build performance during the Sisense upgrade flow.

Jump To Dashboard Add-on

Navigating to multiple dashboards defined by IDs now works as expected.
Drilling to dashboards in Sisense.js-based solutions now works as expected and does not return errors.
The state of the filter’s destination filter is considered and merged as expected when "mergeTargetDashboardFilters": true.

Tabber Add-on

Exported dashboards embedded into email with the Tabber add-on now show all of the widgets from the dashboards without spaces.

Note:

All of the Tabber tabs are displayed, not just the selected one.

Analytical Engine

Analytical Engine now correctly supports complex custom or top ranking filters.
Measured values over multipass calculations are now handled correctly.

BloX

In a dashboard with dependent filters, the BloX widgets are selectable and update the filters as expected.
An issue was resolved which, in some cases, prevented ‘designer’ users from editing BloX widgets.
Improved the processing and display of special symbols, like “@”, in the BloX filter values.

Dashboards and Widgets

Shared tooltips, created via the widget's script, are now working as expected.
The tooltip template of a widget implemented via its script now renders and works as expected.

Data Sources and Connectors

In the Analytics tab, in the Dashboard list, the Data Sources column for live models now lists each data source once, as expected.

Explanations

In some cases, the displayed increase or decrease percentage in the bottom visualization was wrong and did not match the real change when comparing two dates. This now works as expected.
Unexplained fields/dimensions that are automatically added by the system are no longer listed among possible explanations. Nevertheless, when you manually choose a field, and it is not selected as a possible explanation, that field name will be grayed out.
When the result returns an empty data set, there is now a clear message.

Filters

The 'Update' button now appears as expected after deleting a dashboard filter while automatic update on every change is disabled.
The extra white space after turning off the display of dashboard filters in a PDF file is now removed.
The “Select all” option in the new filters interface is now available only after the full members list was loaded, so the selection is applied to all members.

Note:

The list filter option is not intended for excluding members. If you would like to exclude several members from a large list of values, use the dedicated option ‘Is not’. Likewise, to include all values, use the dedicated ‘Include all (no filter applied)' option instead of a list.
The correct values are now displayed in the filter after choosing the "Is not" option in the new numeric filters interface.
The new date filters interface now allows you to select any date within the calendar filter scope (from the earliest to the latest datapoint), even if the date is not present in the dataset.

Infrastructure

The dgraph pod no longer crashes due to a peak in memory consumption during an upgrade.

Multi Tenancy

The tenantid has been added to the logs for the Java backend service (for query, management, build, and the services that are hosted in those services).

Notebooks

Fixed CSV parsing for MySQL to handle the delimiters correctly, so that ";" in the data no longer causes the page to freeze during execution.

Pulse

Pulse alerts are now created for the value selected.

Simply Ask (NLQ)

When the NLQ includes a date filter in the form of 10/10/2022, it is now parsed correctly.
The Favorites button is now disabled for an empty text box.
Long text in the ambiguity drop-down menu is no longer cut off.

Web Access Tokens

When Sisense Embed SDK is accessed via the Web Access Token, the arrow in the dashboard for hiding and expanding the dashboard filter panel now displays as expected.
When widget narratives are enabled for a widget they are available in dashboards that are accessed by means of a Web Access Token. See Using Sisense Narratives for more information.

Video

Watch this video for an overview of selected features from this release: