Release Date: 13 May 2016

Requirements

New Features

Reporting Formats

New report formats have been added to improve report generation and loading performance. It is now possible to report directly to an Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) data source or to an ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) Recordset object. The new report types are:

  • Crystal - reports directly in ODBC format, removing the need for an ODBC filtering process.
  • Crystal ADO - reports in ADO Recordsets for Crystal which are accessible via Crystal's ADO connector.
  • Microsoft ADO - reports in ADO Recordsets for Microsoft products.

Existing Crystal Report and Microsoft (Excel, Power Point and Word) report types that currently connect to an ODBC data source can be changed to use an ADO Recordset.

A description of ADO reporting can be found in the ADO Reports documentation: pdfInternational English | pdfUS English

Unicode Support

Full support for Unicode has been added, including:

  • Support for the Unicode 8.0 character set.
  • Data stored using UTF-8 encoding.
  • Character folding for all Unicode characters.
  • Use of the Default Unicode Collation Element Table (DUCET) for collation (default Unicode sorting order).
  • Punctuation is indexed and searchable.
  • Punctuation characters with special meaning (!~@$^&*()=") must now be escaped with a leading backslash.
  • Auto-phrasing where indexed terms are not separated by spaces are searched as a phrase.

A complete description can be found in the Unicode documentation.

Download a Unicode Cheatsheet: International English | US English

Improvements

Performance Improvements

Performance improvements have been made to sorting, exact matching, reporting and attachment searches in Vitalware. Some examples of the observed performances improvements are:

 

  • Sorting improvements
    ModuleRecordsOld TimeNew TimeFactor Improvement
    Parties 25,000 1:20 0:02 x40
  • Exact matching improvements
    ModuleRecordsOld TimeNew TimeFactor Improvement
    Parties 22,000 2:20 0.01 x80
  • Reporting improvements
    ModuleRecordsOld TimeNew TimeFactor Improvement
    Parties 70,000 10:00 1:00 x10
  • Attachment searching improvements
    ModuleRecordsOld TimeNew TimeFactor Improvement
    Parties 200,000 60:00 9:30 x11
Record Transmit Improvements

In order to transmit a record between systems an update to the record being transmitted was required. Records may now be transmitted without any update, thus preserving their state.

Issues Resolved

Issue Resolution

When a payment type is incorrectly assigned in the invoices module and reversed out, the resulting invoices ledger entry is assigned to the same till which effects balance reporting.

 

The restored invoice entry is no longer assigned to a till, allowing end of day to balance correctly.

A newline may be entered into the POS address field, which causes subsequent address formatting to be incorrect.

 

A newline is no longer able to be inserted into the POS address fields.

For systems that were multi-lingual it was possible that an Access Violation occurred when users were trying to login.

 

An Access violation no longer occurs when users login.

Certain systems experienced difficulty registering a late registration on 29 Feb 2016.

 

Late registration now correctly registers on 29 Feb.

Upgrade Notes

See Upgrade 2.6 to 3.0 for details.