One of the projects we have on the go here at Agilebase is to make our development process a lot more transparent – we’ll be showing customers the ideas and issues they’ve reported, so they can see how many other people also have requested similar things. Release notes like these will be largely automated.

I’ve been holding off these update notes until then, but I think we need to push just one more manual blog post out, as a lot has happened since the last one.

Without further ado then, the main updates recently are:

More control over when to run workflows

You may know that you can set a workflow to run when a record is created, or when it’s viewed. You can now separate those two things to make the workflow run when the record is viewed, but not the first time it’s created. That can speed up the initial creation of records in some situations.

Thanks to Neil at Lewis Pies for requesting this.

Two Factor Authentication (2FA) grace period

When you use 2FA, you used to have only 30 seconds max. to type in the code which your authenticator app provides. We’ve now extended that by accepting the previous code as well, i.e. you get 60 seconds max.

The code actually depends on the clock on your phone or other 2FA device. Just in case the clock is slightly out (uncommon but it has happened to some people), we also accept the next upcoming code.

In short you should have less problems with 2FA codes not being accepted.

Thanks to Alex at Jardox for requesting this.

While on the subject of login security, we’ll also be looking to implement Passkeys in future. Logins will be more secure than even passwords with 2FA, and they’ll be a lot easier. Logging in will be exactly the same as to your laptop, e.g. using a fingerprint sensor or face recognition. We’ll keep you up to date with news on when to expect that.

image: Adaiyaalam

Re-usable calculations

Do you ever create a calculation such as e.g. VAT on an invoice line, then find you need it in more than one place in the system (sometimes in many places)?

You could either copy and paste, or redo the calculation in different views, or join to the first view with the calculation, then add it. Both methods are a bit fiddly – for the first, you run the risk of having to update a calculation in loads of places if it ever changes, for the second, you have to find the right view containing the calculation you want, then figure out a manual join to it.

We always want to reduce complexity and make application building more intuitive, so we’ve now automated that.

Whenever you’re adding a field to a view now, if you scroll to the bottom of the list of available fields, you’ll also see a list of available calculations which you can reuse. Selecting a calculation will automatically add a join to the right view and pull it in.

The calculations listed are

• all those which have been re-used at least once (if you’ve re-used it once it’s likely you will again)
• those in all pinned and recently accessed views

Thanks to both Annabel at the Bristol Mayoral Combined Authority and Richard from Little House Consulting for independently requesting something like that.

Emoji support

You can now copy and paste emojis into both field names and tab names, in a form. 

Emojis can be copied from list such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emojis

✴️😀🚀

Thanks to Neil from Lewis 🥧 for that request

Performance improvements

The database cache refresh logic has been tweaked to improve performance, using more sophisticated checks – for anyone interested in the technical details, the considerations have been these: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71770152/postgresql-refresh-materialized-views-concurrently

The long and short of it is that certain actions should be significantly faster.

Thanks to Jardox for prompting the research resulting in this.

APIs – character encoding

There used to be an issue sending data into Agilebase from third party software, that had accented or other special characters such as é. That bug is now fixed.

AI builder enhancements

When using AI features to build a system from scratch, you could sometimes be left with some bits slightly unfinished, e.g. tabs with no fields in so you couldn’t see the tab content. That’s now been resolved. Thanks to Richard from Little House Consulting for reporting that.

Various other minor bugfixes and improvements have been applied as well.

We continue to improve the system from all feedback. New customers in particular often have fresh ideas and we are taking on a few at the moment, so look forward to plenty more updates and improvements soon!