New functionalities

• Add a new dataimport store (SQLGenObjectStore). This store enables a fast import of data (entity creation, link creation) in CubicWeb, by directly flushing information in SQL. This may only be used with PostgreSQL, as it requires the 'COPY FROM' command.

API changes

• Orm: set_attributes and set_relations are unified (and deprecated) in favor of cw_set that works in all cases.

• db-api/configuration: all the external repository connection information is now in an URL (see #2521848), allowing to drop specific options of pyro nameserver host, group, etc and fix broken ZMQ source. Configuration related changes:

  • Dropped 'pyro-ns-host', 'pyro-instance-id', 'pyro-ns-group' from the client side configuration, in favor of 'repository-uri'. NO MIGRATION IS DONE, supposing there is no web-only configuration in the wild.
  • Stop discovering the connection method through repo_method class attribute of the configuration, varying according to the configuration class. This is a first step on the way to a simpler configuration handling.

  DB-API related changes:

  • Stop indicating the connection method using ConnectionProperties.
  • Drop _cnxtype attribute from Connection and cnxtype from Session. The former is replaced by a is_repo_in_memory property and the later is totaly useless.
  • Turn repo_connect into _repo_connect to mark it as a private function.
  • Deprecate in_memory_cnx which becomes useless, use _repo_connect instead if necessary.

• the "tcp://" uri scheme used for ZMQ communications (in a way reminiscent of Pyro) is now named "zmqpickle-tcp://", so as to make room for future zmq-based lightweight communications (without python objects pickling).

• Request.base_url gets a secure=True optional parameter that yields an https url if possible, allowing hook-generated content to send secure urls (e.g. when sending mail notifications)

• Dataimport ucsvreader gets a new boolean ignore_errors parameter.

Unintrusive API changes

• Drop of cubicweb.web.uicfg.AutoformSectionRelationTags.bw_tag_map, deprecated since 3.6.

User interface changes

• The RQL search bar has now some auto-completion support. It means relation types or entity types can be suggested while typing. It is an awesome improvement over the current behaviour !
• The action box associated with table views (from tableview.py) has been transformed into a nice-looking series of small tabs; it means that the possible actions are immediately visible and need not be discovered by clicking on an almost invisible icon on the upper right.
• The uicfg module has moved to web/views/ and ui configuration objects are now selectable. This will reduce the amount of subclassing and whole methods replacement usually needed to customize the ui behaviour in many cases.
• Remove changelog view, as neither cubicweb nor known cubes/applications were properly feeding related files.

Other changes

• 'pyrorql' sources will be automatically updated to use an URL to locate the source rather than configuration option. 'zmqrql' sources were broken before this change, so no upgrade is needed...
• Debugging filters for Hooks and Operations have been added.
• Some cubicweb-ctl commands used to show the output of msgcat and msgfmt; they don't anymore.

Form construction

Cubicweb has had for long a nice system of forms smart enough to build themselves out of one cube's schema and some programmer-provided hints (or 'relation tags') to fine-tune things.

It was not easy however to customize these forms nor to build new ones from scratch.

So the new form systems draws from django-forms flexibility and style, keeping all the automatic goodness, and also make it quite easy now to build or customize forms at will.

This is the area were backwards compatibility is mostly gone. Custom forms will have to be rewritten. Don't be angry about that, the forms overhaul was long overdue, and from now it will only move in small evolutionary, well-mannered steps.

Relation tags

Along with the form subsystem is the __rtags__ mechanism substantially updated and made more extensible. The __rtags__ were quite incorrectly attached to entities class at the ORM level instead of being related to views and forms. The cubicweb.web.uicfg module now provides a comprehensive catalog of relation tags instances allowing automatic forms and views customisation in a nicely declarative manner.

Cubicweb 3.2 still remains compatible with the old __rtags__.

View selection/filtering

Cubiweb has also had for long a nice mechanism to filter views applicable to a given result set, the selector system. Various base classes were provided to hide selectors from the programmer and it had grown a little messy.

Selectors now have a nicer declarative feeling and the framework does not try to hide them. Quite the opposite: writing, maintaining and using selectors is now a breeze, and the base classes are gone. More is less !

However Cubicweb 3.2 remains backward compatible with the old selectors. Runtime warnings will help you track these and adapt as you see fit.

Other features

On the smaller features side, worth mentioning are:

• new RichString attribute type in schema definitions, that simplifies format and encoding management,
• inline relation edition is now possible (it was formerly limited to attributes) with 'reledit' view,
• workflow definition has been simplified,
• web/views has been somewhat cleanup up and reorganized,
• automatic registration of app objects can now be switched to manual mode (no more hairy hard-to-debug registerer mechanism),
• a generic SIOC view,
• a view synthetizing permissions across a whole app.

We hope you enjoy this release! The cubicweb development team.

photo by jared under creative commons