The new version of the CUBA platform has been released, bringing in several major new features, along with a number of bug fixes and improvements.

The main improvements and enhancements of the 5.6 version are as follows.

Business Process Management

The new Business Process Management (BPM) subsystem allows you to create and run BPMN (Business Process Management Notation) 2.0 business processes. It has most of the features available in our Workflow subsystem, such as the visual process designer and tight integration with application screens and the data model. The obvious advantage over the old Workflow subsystem is the adherence to the modern and widely used BPMN 2.0 standard. Now your business analysts are able to create processes using the familiar notation, and then simply import them into the CUBA-based application and run with minimum of modifications.

Example of a process design:

The process instance screen enables generic process control, such as taking process actions, managing actors and attachments:

The BPM base project is intended to be an alternative to the old Workflow mechanism and should be used in all new projects instead of Workflow. Detailed documentation is available here.

Report Output to Chart

If your application project employs both reports and charts base projects, you can create reports that are displayed in a special Chart screen inside of your web application. This screen can be opened from any application screen via RunReportAction or from the main menu Reports > Show Charts.

Example of the Chart screen:

A report data structure is defined as usual and can contain queries in SQL, JPQL or Groovy:

Chart template editor allows you to define the chart type (pie or serial), link chart axes to band fields and specify additional visualization parameters:

Other Platform Improvements

The CellClickListener and PlainTextCell interfaces allow you to improve performance of the Table component by eliminating the need to create heavy-weight components inside generated cells.

In the Filter component, a desired table page size is now selected from the drop-down list with the predefined set of values, which is more convenient than before.

The Data Recovery screen now restores the whole graph of entities deleted by cascade relations. For example, if you delete a Role with Permissions, after restoring the Role the Permissions will also be restored automatically.

CUBA Studio 1.6

The new Studio release introduces the Full-Text Search configuration editor. If you use the fts base project for your CUBA application then the Main menu navigator section will be changed to Other. This new section provides access to the fts.xml editing page:

Moreover, when you create new entities, Studio adds them to the FTS configuration with default settings.

The detailed release notes of CUBA Platform 5.6 are available here.

The full list of changes in this Studio release can be found here.