New Features: Custom Field Validation, Field-level Permissions, 3-Column Layout, Workflow Processes, Heirarchical App Navigation, etc

Over the past two weeks a number of significant new features and enhancements have been released, some of which we've highlighted in this post:

Custom Field Validation

Many of you have been looking forward to more control over field validation and it is finally here. Now, as with formulas and workflow event conditions, you can use the full power of JavaScript to define validation rules that are as simple or as sophisticated as your business needs demand.

While many fields already allowed you to specify some validation rules such as a text field mask or
bounds for a numeric field, until now you could not write your own. Next to each field you will now see a new link called "Validation" which allows you to define a custom JavaScript-based formula.

The syntax of validation formulas is the same as that used to define Formula fields and Workflow Event conditions. See the Rollbase Formula Guide for more information.

Returning any non-null String indicates an error and that String will be displayed to the user as a field-level error as shown here:

Field-level Permissions

Until now Rollbase did not allow you to define permissions for individual object fields. Now you will find a new "Permissions" link next to each field providing a way to specify whether any given role can see that field, and if they can see it, whether or not it should always be read-only for users with that role. This provides much more fine-grained access control over your data structures.

3-Column Layout

Previously in Rollbase you could organize page sections into one or two-column layouts, but three-column layouts were not possible. We've now expanded the page editor and backend page rendering mechanism to support 1, 2, and 3-column layouts as shown here:

Workflow Processes

Rollbase Workflow Statuses, Actions and most significantly Events provide a broad palette of options for designing both user-driven as well as automated business processes. However, previous to this weekend's update there was no way to allow more than a single user-driven workflow process per object definition. This might be limiting for companies with different processes for say new employees depending on the department they've been hired into, or asset requests depending on asset type.

Now all Objects have a new component called Workflow Processes. Each Workflow Process represents a sequence of Statuses and Actions that records can be moved through. Every object with the "Workflow" attribute now has a new field corresponding to this called "Workflow Process" allowing you to select or pre-populate new records with the appropriate Workflow Process definition. When a particular process is selected, the "Workflow Status" field will only allow selection of statuses associated with the selected process. In this way, you can support any number of workflow processes for any object definition.

Hierarchical Application Navigation

In the spirit of Web 2.0 we've been focusing on ways to reduce the number of clicks it takes to get where you need to go in any Rollbase application. Many of you may have already noticed the newly expanded "Applications" sidebar component allowing you to drill down to any major function within an application from here rather than by navigating from page to page. This was a user-requested feature that is already saving us time internally.

Along with this we've also introduced the notion of page children, allowing you to create new pages and attach them to parent pages, providing a way to create an application hierarchy deeper than the default three levels (any depth is now possible).

Custom OnLoad JavaScript for Pages

Now you can define any JavaScript to run on a page's OnLoad event (i.e. when the page has been fully rendered by the browser). This applies to both back-end application and portal pages. You will find a new "OnLoad" action next to each Page in an Object's details page. This is one of the first steps we've taken toward providing Rollbase app developers with more dynamic JavaScript-based control over forms. Stay tuned for field-level event control capabilities in a future release.

Portal Cloning

Entire Portals can now be cloned, allowing you to make a copy of an existing portal that may need small modifications for a unique but similar purpose. Rather than re-building much of the same functionality from scratch, you can use the "Clone" action next to each Portal to make a full copy.

Portal Page Synchronization

The recent page synchronization feature has been popular for users managing pages with large numbers of fields. However, this only applied to back-end application pages. Users managing multiple Portal pages had no way of synchronizing page changes until now. The "Save & Synchronize" button is now available when editing object-specific Portal pages.

Setup Filters for Easier Application Management

Now Rollbase Administrators can filter the Objects, Tabs, Portals and Permissions pages by Application, providing a way to narrow in on the appropriate application components and related permissions much faster by selecting an application. This is another user-suggested feature that is already saving us time internally. As shown here, a new picklist appears at the top of the Objects page allowing you to narrow your view to only Objects associated with the selected Application:

New Feature Tour

Yesterday morning a Feature Tour made its way onto the Rollbase website consisting of screenshots and descriptions of many core Rollbase features. We've received some unexpected feedback suggesting we adopt the look & feel of this tour into Rollbase itself (something we'll be considering to a certain extent ; there is still quite a bit planned for the UI prior to removal of the "beta" label).

Take the Tour

User Profiles and Unified Portals Powered by Rollbase

At Rollbase we take pride in using Rollbase-native features and functionality to manage as much of our business as possible. This includes over 15 applications we use internally on a daily basis for everything from Bug and Feature Tracking to Customer provisioning, Support and Case Management, Leads and Campaigns, HR, Engineering, Legal and Investor Management, etc. It also includes a growing number of external-facing Portals we use to power everything from Customer creation and provisioning, the Application Directory, Forums, Ideas, and Support Ticket management, Recurring subscription signup and billing, and much more. All of these systems are seamlessly integrated with our website and built purely using Rollbase Portal capabilities.

This week the Rollbase Services & Support team, headed up by Ricardo Perez, is proud to announce the release of User Profiles and LinkedIn-style connection capabilities as well as a new unified support experience -- all built using standard Rollbase portal features. Select "My Profile" from the Support drop-down in your Rollbase account:

This allows you to establish a public Rollbase user profile, connect with other Rollbase users, and move seamlessly between the Rollbase Forums, Ideas and Support Ticket management systems:

Whenever you see the "Powered by Rollbase" logo on our website you are actually inside a Rollbase Portal built by our Services & Support team. Each of these portals is managed separately. However, because the core Rollbase Subscriber object has the "Portal Visitor" attribute, we can manage authentication information across each of these portals identically (in essence, portals support SSO for portal visitors). The end result is that as a user, you do not notice that you are moving between multiple different portals when you access Forums, Ideas, Support or My Profile.

These are just a few examples of how Rollbase can be applied to a wide variety of business problems and situations. Our Services team is busy working with customers to help translate unique product ideas into reality in record time. If you have an idea for a Rollbase application or Portal we encourage you to contact the Services team to get started before the beta period ends.

SOAP and REST API Examples in PHP, Java and Excel

For Rollbase developers working with the SOAP and REST APIs we've published two new documents with code examples showing each API in action. See: Documentation & Tutorials

REST Examples in PHP

Download: rollbase_REST_examples.pdf

The REST API Examples document contains examples of using each method of the Rollbase REST API in PHP. Because some Rollbase API methods require POST requests we use curl. For example the following is a PHP method that can be used to make REST requests using curl:

function restCall($request, $method, $pbody="") {
       //Initialize a curl session
       $session = curl_init($request);

       /* You then set any curl options that you might need. curl
       options are listed at
       http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-setopt.php. In this
       case, we tell curl that we don't want the HTTP headers returned,
       but we do want the request data returned: */

       // Tell curl not to return headers, but do return the response
       curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);

       curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

       if($method == 'POST') {//For post method notify curl
              // Tell curl to use HTTP POST
              curl_setopt ($session, CURLOPT_POST, true);

              // Tell curl that this is the body of the POST
              curl_setopt ($session, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $pbody);
       }
       
       //send request
       $response = curl_exec($session);

       //close session
       curl_close($session);
       
       //this is the response(xml)
       return $response;
}

Now we can invoke any Rollbase REST API method easily in PHP. For example, login is the first REST call that should be made to Rollbase in order to establish an API session and retrieve a session ID. To login to a Rollbase account with username TestUser and password mypass our PHP code might look like:

       $uname = ‘TestUser’;
       $pword = ‘mypass’;
       $request =
        'https://www.rollbase.com/rest/api/login?loginName='.$uname.'&password='.$pword;
       $response= restCall($request, "GET");

Here we are using the above restCall function to make the request. The XML response can now be processed to obtain the session ID. See Rollbase REST API Examples for more...

SOAP Examples in Java

Download: rollbase_SOAP_examples.pdf

The SOAP API Examples document contains examples of using each method of the Rollbase SOAP API in PHP. In addition it also contains an introduction to using the SOAP API with Java using Eclipse WTP (Web Tools Platform) as well as Microsoft Excel.

Eclipse WTP can create appropriate Java stubs by reading and parsing the Rollbase WSDL file available at http://www.rollbase.com/webapi/wsdl/rollbase.wsdl. These stubs can then be used to integrate any of your Java applications with Rollbase.

In our example we use Eclipse WTP to dynamically generate all of the Java classes necessary to develop a client application using the SOAP API:

SOAP Examples in Excel

As with other Microsoft Office applications, Excel provides the ability to use SOAP-based web services. Therefore it is possible to use the Rollbase SOAP API through an Excel spreadsheet and integrate it with your Rollbase account.

Calling a web service in Excel is similar to calling a built-in Excel function, in that you supply information (as arguments) and retrieve a result to display in a particular cell.

Following a few easy steps Excel allows you to point to a WSDL from which it can automatically generate Visual Basic code corresponding to each method defined in the API:

Once this is done, you can then use these methods in your own custom Excel functions. Creating custom functions in Excel is a straightforward exercise using Visual Basic. For example, to call the login method we might create the following function:

       Function rb_login(uname As String, pass As String)
              Dim clientObj As New clsws_IWebServicesService
              Dim session_id As String
              rb_login = clientObj.wsm_login(uname, pass
       End Function

See Rollbase SOAP API Examples for more...

Live SOAP & REST Demos

This week we launched two new PHP-based portals for testing both the SOAP and REST APIs live using your Rollbase account.

To access these examples head over to:
http://apidemo.rollbase.com/apidemo/index.php

When you select either SOAP API or REST API, you can login to your account and run most of the API methods available without writing code to get a feel for how API interaction works:

For example, when you are logged into the REST API, if you select the Create method and provide the integration name of an object in your account (such as 'meeting'), a form will be created for you on the fly with all of your object's fields so you can create a new record:

These API portals are a portion of the recent work we've done to document and expose the integration and extension capabilities of Rollbase a bit more.

Next up: Code examples and documentation covering the use of Rollbase SOAP and REST APIs in PHP, Java and Microsoft Excel.