Yellowfin 9.3 Release Highlights

Yellowfin 9.3 Release Highlights

In the latest release, the Yellowfin team continues to build on core strengths for our customers by improving the dashboard and report building experience, and offering an even broader range of API capabilities to empower software companies and enterprise customers alike to build truly contextualized analytics.

For the full list of updates, please visit our What's New in Yellowfin page and check out the video below to see some of these new enhancements in action:

Dashboards & Presentations

If you have been given the access by your local administrator, you might notice a new icon on your dashboards and presentations.
Dashboard Broadcasting

Broadcasting is now available in this release for both dashboards and presentations. Just like reports, you can now enable scheduled delivery of these analytic content to different audiences. We have also included additional options for schedules — making it more granular for specific frequencies. For example, for fortnightly broadcasts I can now set the delivery to be on the second Monday. Or for monthly broadcasts, to have deliveries happen on the fifth day every month.

Export to PDF has been re-introduced for both dashboards and presentations. Not only does PDF generation now support both dashboard canvas and preset layouts, the generated rendering is pixel-perfect and includes visual representations for any JavaScript Chart and Code Mode object used in your dashboards and presentations.

For dashboard designers, we have refreshed Text Widgets to make text formatting much easier and intuitive.

Enhanced Text Widget

In this release, the first click on the text widget will highlight the widget — allowing you to reliably change its properties on the property panel. Any further clicks involved on the properties panel will not remove the focus on the text widget itself. The second click on the text widget will enter active typing mode and allow you to modify the text as you need. Visual indicators are provided where a blinking cursor is displayed, with a much bolder blue outline around the text widget. As part of this enhancement, keyboard shortcuts for bold, underline and italics are now supported.

We have also improved the process of adding images to your dashboards and presentations. When you upload your images into Yellowfin, the Image Widget will automatically crop and add the image directly onto the canvas. For existing images, all that is needed is a quick drag-and-drop.

Enhanced Image Widget

You can now replace images on the canvas simply by right-clicking on it and selecting Replace Image. The action here will both substitute in the new image in-line and retain the properties of the previous image.

As part of this enhancement, a brand new Image Manager is now available. The new Image Manager has multiple sorting and layout options including a search bar with greatly improved search performance.

We have also added new categories within the Image Manager to make searching for specific images much easier. You can filter for all images on the Yellowfin platform, corporate images, recent images or the ones uploaded by you previously. Corporate images are images on production analytic content that cannot be modified or deleted unless you have the appropriate role access to do so.

Data Discovery

For the Data Discovery product, we have implemented multiple enhancements to provide an uplift to tabular reports including the ability for customers to re-use portions of their tabular data in unique and creative ways within charts and dashboards.

 
A new Image Link Formatter has been introduced in this release to instantly display images within your tabular reports. Previously, report authors had to provide additional HTML syntax around URL columns before formatting them into images. Now, all you need to do is apply the Image Link Formatter on your columns containing image URLs and Yellowfin will instantly cache and display the images in-line — no HTML coding required. In addition, you can customize how large the displayed images should be as well as nominating a default display image if there are null or blank values in your URL column.
Image Link Formatter

We have also introduced a new option to move column totals and subtotals to the start of a tabular report. This is particularly useful for large column or row-based reports where historically you would have to scroll to the bottom or to the right to see these totals.

For report authors who construct Drill Through paths across multiple reports, you can now utilize your hard-coded filters from your parent report and link them to filters on the child report — offering more flexibility in Drill Through setups.
 
You can also now apply left or right text alignment to your Numeric Display charts. In previous releases, the numeric values were constantly centred. This might not be desired in certain scenarios on the canvas — especially when the metric is dynamic enough to show both large and small summarized values. With this enhancement, you can be assured that your design-led charts and dashboards have constantly-aligned Numeric Display charts no matter how the values change.

Last but not least, is the introduction of a new tablevalue parameter into Text Widget Replacements. Text Widget Replacements allow you to construct dynamic narratives for your charts by substituting in column totals and filter values into text widgets. As the report refreshes, so do the values in your text widgets. In 9.3, the new tablevalue parameter expands on this feature and gives you access to any column or row value in your tabular reports.

Enhanced Text Widget Parameters

As part of this enhancement, tablevalue also displays formatted column values. Remember the Image Link Formatter mentioned above with the bottle images? Accessing this via tablevalue in this scenario will display the bottle images in your text widgets — enabling you to build creative narratives that are visual, easy to understand and dynamically change when your users interact with the report.

Analytics Suite

Similar to previous releases, we continue to enhance both JavaScript and REST APIs.
 
Assisted Insights is now supported for content embedded with JavaScript API — allowing you to embed all of Yellowfin’s A.I. capabilities into your applications.
As part of this update, Drill Through is now supported in JavaScript API. This means every single interactive dashboard feature is now accessible for embedded content. At the code level, developers can also toggle every report interaction — drills, chart brushing, series and unit selections, date sliders — to not only re-use reports for multiple embedded scenarios but also allow them to develop custom UI for each interaction.
 
For REST API, we have included new endpoints for Broadcast Alerts. Your product teams can now create their own custom UI to display broadcast alerts and decide what the journey should be around these notifications. A whole list of new endpoints have been added to help automate the management of users, roles, data sources, licenses and much more — see this section to know what they are and how to utilize them.
And that’s it for the Yellowfin 9.3 release highlights! Please continue to send feedback to us and we hope you enjoy the latest release.