Platform Update - Resource Jobs for Experience Users, and Integration and Endpoint Improvements

Today’s update provides a broad range of improvements to several features of Losant’s IoT platform, many of which were requested by our users.

Resource Jobs for Experience Users

We’ve received a number of questions about how to automatically send a weekly tailored dashboard report to every Experience User in an application. None of the workarounds we proposed fully solved the use case; we kept coming back to, “If only we supported Experience Users in Resource Jobs.” You can guess what happened next.

With today’s release, Experience Users are now a selectable resource type for Resource Jobs, enabling not only this periodic dashboard report use case but several other processes, such as bulk editing and user activity reports.

We’ve added a new Experience User Dashboard Reports entry into our Template Library to demonstrate the dashboard report functionality. Developers can import this template into their existing applications, make a few adjustments, and then begin delivering recurring reports to the inboxes of their users.

A couple additional features spun out of this new functionality …

• To facilitate the dashboard report use case, we’ve changed the Dashboard: Send Report API endpoint to allow one concurrent request per application. We made the same change for the Data: Export API endpoint for the similar case of emailing all users a CSV of their device data on a regular basis.
• We now support advanced queries in the User: Get Node and in the Experience Users: Get API endpoint.

We look forward to seeing the other use cases this platform addition solves for our users. If you have an issue that Resource Jobs would be a good solution for, but we don’t yet support the required resources in the job configuration, please let us know.

Integration Enhancements

Next, we’ve added two new features for each of our real-time third-party data integrations. The workflow triggers previously would only execute on receipt of a message from the chosen integration (such as a message received from an Amazon SQS queue). With today’s release, the triggers can optionally fire on several integration events …

• On a successful integration connection
• On receipt of a message (the previous behavior)
• On an integration disconnection
• On an integration failing to connect

This allows Losant developers to, for example, log an event or send a WhatsApp notification when an Azure Event Hubs integration fails to reconnect, alerting developers to potential problems much earlier than they would have discovered previously.

Also, the integration output nodes now support string templates defining the integration ID on which to publish a message. We noticed some of our users duplicating workflows to get the same publishing behavior across several integrations of the same type, and realized an easy improvement to those nodes - allowing for dynamically providing the integration ID as a template - would help those users clean up their applications.

Endpoint Request Handling Improvements

Finally, we’ve added new features that make handling common Experience Endpoint behavior much easier.

First, the Unauthorized Reply behavior that is configured per endpoint - in most cases, redirecting users who aren’t signed in to your experience’s login page - can now be defined at the experience version level, thereby applying this common behavior in one place instead of potentially dozens. Unauthorized Replies defined per endpoint will take precedence over those defined on the version, meaning you can have custom unauthorized access behavior for specific use cases.

Similarly, you may now also define Not Found Reply behavior at the version level - meaning that you can, for example, display a custom 404 page to your end users when they reach an undefined route. Previously it was possible to achieve this behavior with a catch-all 404 route, and that behavior will continue to work; however, that method requires defining the same route for each HTTP method your experience supports, leading to more duplication in your application.

Finally, we’ve seen several users take advantage of the Loggly: Write Node to log all experience endpoint requests for their own tracking/billing purposes. To facilitate this, we’ve added an option to the Endpoint Trigger to fire for any request to the experience version’s endpoints, including automatic 404 Not Found and 401 Unauthorized responses. Adding this option to the trigger not only catches additional end user behavior, but it also makes it much easier for Losant developers to maintain this Loggly integration - as in, no more managing a single workflow with triggers for each and every endpoint.

Other Updates

As always, this release comes with several minor features and improvements, including:

• We’ve added SQL service credentials to allow for securely storing authentication information used in the SQL Node. Since the introduction of our service credentials feature, we’ve continued to add additional use cases; if you have a suggestion for which service we should support next, please let us know!
• Instance administrators can now create Instance Custom Nodes for use in Edge Workflows. This allows for exposing Edge Custom Nodes to their end users in the form of first-class workflow nodes.
• Dashboards that utilize device or experience user context variables no longer run into import errors when those resources are not included in an application import request. Instead, we set those variable default values to a placeholder ID - which allows the import to proceed and prevents any unauthorized data access, but still requires developer action post-import to provide a new default value.
• We’ve added a {{substring}} Handlebars helper that mimics the behavior of JavaScript’s String.prototype.substring() method.
• Modbus: Read and Modbus: Write Nodes now support ASCII serial connections, expanding the possible use cases of the node to additional PLCs.
• The SendGrid Node now pushes the applicationId, workflowId, and workflowVersion to SendGrid’s logs every time the node is invoked. This is helpful in tracking down the source of email sends from your Losant application.

Template Library Updates

We’re continuing to grow our Template Library with new entries designed to demonstrate Losant best practices, shorten time to market, and improve end user experience. This release includes one additional Template Library update along with the Experience User Dashboard Reports template mentioned above.

Our Connected Product Foundation has been a big hit since its release, and we continue to improve on the base template with every platform update. With today’s release, we are adding a version of that starter application to our Template Library, which allows Losant users to import the CPF’s experience endpoints, workflows, and views into an existing application

We are also updating our application experience bootstrapping to use this new template as the recommended starting point for any new end user experience. Users who do not wish to start from the CPF can skip this step and import the components of our original experience bootstrapping from the Template Library.

What’s Next?

With every new release, we listen to your feedback. By combining your suggestions with our roadmap, we can continue to improve the platform while maintaining its ease of use. Let us know what you think in the Losant Forums.