DNN Blogs

Written for the Community, by the Community

2sxc 11.20 with VisualQuery3 and REST Awesomeness

Written By iJungleboy
2021-04-20

Love Low-Code solutions? This big release is for you! VisualQuery3 makes drag-drop data flow a breeze to develop and debug, and the new REST guidance will get your JSON APIs going in less than 5 minutes. 

Highlights Overview

  1. VisualQuery 3 makes queries much easier
  2. New DataSources for Low-Code Solutions
  3. Helper Dialogs to start using REST JSON APIs
  4. Performance enhancements in the edit UX
  5. More than 250 hours invested into documentation

#1 VisualQuery 3

VisualQuery underwent a huge revamp. The main highlights:

Click on a Stream to see what's inside

Errors don't break the Query - they help you fix them

More

  1. UI now highlights required streams
  2. UI helps discover Dynamic-In-Streams 
  3. All DataSources now have great names, icons and short labels
  4. The default/initial query is now much simpler (just 1 DataSource)
  5. The Admin-UI shows you how to use the Query in a REST scenario and tells you if security is misconfigured
  6. Testing the Query is much faster even if it has 10'000 items, because in test-mode it will only return the top 25 (unless you want more)
  7. Complex exceptions are logged to insights so admins can debug them
  8. UI tells you if Params or Test-Params look like you got them wrong

#2 New DataSources

We've created 3 new DataSources: TreeModeler, SerializationConfiguration and LanguageModeler. Best just go ahead and try them out 👍.

BTW: We also updated all the documentations and samples how to create your own DataSources, so this too will now be much, much easier. 

#3 Helper Dialogs get you Started with JSON REST APIs

The Admin UI now has REST guidance APIs for Content-APIs, Query-APIs and custom C# WebAPIs. These dialogs also give you JS snippets to use in your code and help you to configure security as should be. 

In the image above you can see how you can interactively pick controllers and actions, to see what they expect and how to call them using JavaScript. You can also test them live from the admin-UI.

Various permission dialogs tell you how the permissions are set up and help you figure out why the API only works for SuperUsers 😉. 

#4 Performance in the Edit-UI

Previously edit-dialogs tended to get slower if you had dropdowns selecting other data with large backing lists. We now pre-load all relevant data so the UI can be 10x faster in certain scenarios 💖.

#5 More than 250 Hours of new Documentation

2sxc has grown in the last 9 years to become a full CMS and a Low-Code platform and a SPA-Platform all in one. We've now invested a LOT of time to document the entire stack, features and APIs. We're not done, but we believe you should really revisit our docs because they really shine 🌟.

We also added this infographic to most of the pages and highlight the parts relevant to each page, to help you navigate the plethora of features:

 

Get it Now 🚀

...from the GitHub Releases!

With Love from Switzerland and Croatia,
Daniel (iJungleboy), Petar and Tonci

PS: Up next we'll release another LTS within the next few days!

 

Daniel Mettler grew up in the jungles of Indonesia and is founder and CEO of 2sic internet solutions in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, an 20-head web specialist with over 800 DNN projects since 1999. He is also chief architect of 2sxc (see github), an open source module for creating attractive content and DNN Apps.



Read more posts by Daniel Mettler
Total: 0 Comment(s)

Would you like to help us?

Awesome! Simply post in the forums using the link below and we'll get you started.

Get Involved