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Ad Hoc Reporting System REST Services
 Monday, January 13, 2014

A complete set of REST services is available for external clients to run any report to which their access_key has privileges. The data is returned in JSON format. These services are powerful enough for a custom application to recreate the Reports menu and everything inside it with the one exception of not supporting Favorites. With the introduction of these REST services, the equivalent SOAP services are deprecated and should not be used (the new services are lot faster anyway).
PHP 5.4/HTML 5/CSS 3 Upgrade
 Sunday, December 29, 2013

The framework has been extensively upgraded to fully support many of the new features in HTML 5 and CSS 3, like gradients, rounded corners, shadows and drag & drop multi-file uploading. Most of the buttons, controls and popup dialogs have been converted to custom CSS 3 objects instead of using the browser defaults, so your site will look the same in all browsers and devices. The downside is that browsers older than IE 9 are no longer supported. Note that many of these features are not used within the framework itself but rather to support your custom mobile-friendly applications. Also, all of the PHP deprecated functions have been replaced and the framework can now run in strict mode without spamming the log. However, this effectively makes PHP 5.1 the baseline for backwards compatibility.
Caching Improvements
 Thursday, November 14, 2013

The method of caching database results has been consolidated into a single function so the overall cache can be more easily managed. The system now considers the available memory and aggressively removes older (and sometimes not so old) results to make room for new results. In addition, there is a new option for storing session data, including the cached results, in the database. Also, the method of caching images for the slideshow has been much improved such that even when viewing a series of large photos for the first time, the images slide by smoother and more consistently. Now the system is much better able to process large Ad Hoc Reports. Improving the cache handler also makes it possible to someday use Memcached as an option (but not yet).
Ad Hoc Report Annotations
 Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Report authors can now allow users to attach a note or comment to a particular line item in an Ad Hoc Report. This note can be free text or a value chosen from a predefined list, which can either be hand coded or pulled from the database via a SQL query. You can have up to six annotation columns in a single report. Each annotation has an icon that pops up a list of all of the comments that have been entered for the line item and column. These annotations are also returned when calling the report via the REST API so it is almost like creating a spreadsheet that serves data to a mobile client. Only downside is that you cannot search by an annotation.
SSO - SimpleSAML
 Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Support for single sign-on (SSO) via SimpleSAML was added. When the SAML directive is setup in the configuration script, the login page will instead display the form generated by the remote authentication service within an iFrame. This has been thoroughly tested with Microsoft ADFS which uses Active Directory for checking the user's credentials. The user must still be setup in the framework (your custom) application to be authorized, but the password is ignored in favor of whatever password was posted into Active Directory.
Fully UTF-8 Compliant
 Friday, December 3, 2010

The benwillies framework is now running in UTF-8 mode from the browser to the database and everywhere in between. This should not make any difference to sites built on top of the framework unless certain non-English languages are being supported but then you would probably have already adjusted the framework to be UTF-8 anyway. If your database is not running UTF-8, you may occasionally see some strange characters displayed, particularly non-breaking spaces ( ) so it is recommended that you convert your MySQL framework database to UTF-8 with ALTER DATABASE yourdatabase CHARACTER SET = utf8 COLLATE = utf8_unicode_ci; and then for each table in that database ALTER TABLE tablename CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci; and ALTER TABLE tablename CHARACTER SET = utf8 COLLATE = utf8_unicode_ci; but please backup your database first!
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