Key Focus Areas For Update

Improvements to Assignments and Cost Allocations

Subtle improvements and speed-ups for assignments and their application in allocations.  These are minor improvements that should help with use.

Table Explorer in Tabs

Viewing table and view data in Table Explorer no longer presents items in a modal window.  Table Explorer opens as a separate tab so multiple tables can be viewed and compared. Additionally, it can stay open while other actions are taken.

Improved Navigation Speed

We continue to search for more ways to help improve productivity in PlaidCloud.  One of the improvements in this release is faster navigation speed and viewing of information.  In the past, when viewing workflows, in projects with many steps or significant numbers of tables (e.g. > 5,000), the presentation of information might take several seconds.  We are addressing this issue as well with the update so that process will render quickly.

Improved Data Mapper Column Moving

The data mappers now allow for groups of rows to be moved.  In addition, the move operation is now available in the menu rather than requiring a right-click operation.  This should allow moving a column or groups of columns much more quickly.

Improved Error Presentation

We all hope we don’t make mistakes but when we do, getting relevant information quickly is critical for fixing the problem.  In this release, several improvements to error messaging will help direct you to the specific error rather than having to sort through large stack traces, which can be time consuming and confusing in some cases.

Better Handling of Project Names on Export

In the past, odd behavior would occur when exporting a project with a “/” in the name.  The slash (“/”) was interpreted as a path element.  This is now replaced with an underscore (“_”) to the project export appears in the expected location.

Melt Value Column Data Type Setting

Previously, the data type of a Melt operation was determined by choosing the data type of the columns if they were all the same or defaulting back to Text if there were any differences.  This often caused the need to add an Extract step after a Melt to set the data type.  The Melt transform now allows setting a desired data type directly in the step.