Summary of New Features in LFRM 4.2

Created on Friday, 11 June 2010 11:17

In the latest version of LFRM you'll find new features that continue to help us realize our goal of easy data integration on the web.  Many of these new features are not substantial in themselves, but collectively they greatly improve the usability of Logos by making Logos easier to use and by offering useful features.

We would like to thank our many users who worked with us during the beta and release candidate stages of this release.  Many of these features come at the request of our users, and when we find bugs with either the new code or perhaps some much older code, we appreciate these users who help us identify the problem and test the solution.

Community, Express, and Professional

One of the most notable differences between the previous version of Logos and the new 4.2 code is that it comes in three different versions.  Our Community Edition is free to use and provides a great tool to search for and to view records in a database.  The Express Edition offers  the traditional Grid interface and additional tools that one needs to add, edit, publish, and delete records in the database.  Finally, the Professional Edition allows one more options to customize an application, and the ability to create your own custom forms and reports.

New Application Wizard

Unlike in previous versions of Logos, the Wizard is now integrated directly into the Application interface.  The new Wizard has also been greatly simplified and is easier to use, especially for novice users that were sometimes confused with the multi-step Wizard in 4.1 .

New PDO Interface

The new PDO interface is a great way to connect to non-MySQL databases, and will replace the ADOdb interface in the next major release of LFRM, version 5.0 .  We've already created some documentation about how to connect to MS Access and MS SQL Server databases, and are currently working on some documentation about connecting to Oracle.

Grid Printing

We've added the ability to print directly from the grid in Logos 4.2 .  This is a great feature because it works well with the Grid Filtering feature added in 4.1, meaning that only the filtered records will be printed.

Numeric Filter

The new numeric filter is a slider that let's one filter the data in the grid by moving the filter thumbs. This feature was actually on the TODO list for 4.1 but postponed until the ExtJS library, which provides much of the frontend form and grid display, offered the slider that supported multiple thumbs.

Export Toolbar

Although Logos has long supported the rendering of data in non-HTML formats, the new toolbar is a simple toggle switch that will print the links needed by the user to extract data from the database based on the search results.

Minor Improvements

Finally, we've also made numerous changes that may not be so obvious, like improving the display of float data in the grid, fixing problems with Internet Explorer, and offering several minor improvements with the layout.