What's New in K2 Cloud Update 5

• Management
  • Runaway Workflows: You can create a workflow policy in Management that stops workflows from starting that loop or recursively start themselves in an uncontrolled manner, preventing performance degradation or system outages.
• Workflow Designer
  • Warning Badge on Start Step: K2 is smart enough to assist you while you’re designing your workflows. The latest SmartAssist functionality prevents workflows from being accidentally deployed when there is no form or event configured to start the workflow.
• SmartObject and SmartBox
  • SmartBox Property Indexing: Improve your SmartObject's runtime performance by using the new SmartBox property index functionality. When creating the SmartObject, select which properties must be indexed. When you do this, a SQL index is created in the SmartBox database which helps when filtering or sorting on your data at runtime.

• Workflow Designer
  • Call Sub Workflow: Often a single item of work results in multiple tasks, for example, when an order request requires each line item to go through a separate review process before the order can be approved. This is now possible by starting multiple workflows from a parent workflow, where you can configure the parent workflow to wait for the sub workflows to complete before continuing, or you can set the parent workflow to continue after starting the sub workflows. See the following How to topics on configuring a solution using the Call Sub Workflow:
    • Create a workflow that contains a sub workflow that starts multiple instances
    • Create a workflow that contains a sub workflow that starts a single instance
  • Task Step: Enhancements make it easier to configure and use the task notifications in the Task step in a workflow. You can search for users and groups to add to the BCC and CC line in both tabs.
• the Designer
  • Server -Side Rule Execution:

    Additional actions and conditions are available in the server-side rule execution which improves your forms performance by using server-side rules to fetch data from the server and download it to the browser while the SmartForm is being rendered. The following has been added:

    Actions

    • Execute SmartObject Method
    • Populate List control
    • Transfer data

    Conditions

    • Advanced condition
  • Form and View overlay opacity: You can now control a view and forms overlay opacity, this allows you to lighten overlays on certain forms and views representing steps in a sequence, hiding the flashing effect when navigating between steps. This setting is applied at runtime when the overlay is shown.
• Security and Governance
  • SmartObject Data Access: When securing your data using the Data Access Policy in Management, you can view and manage permissions in the limited access section by user, role and groups as opposed to by each individual record in the SmartObject.
• Integration

  • SharePoint Service Instance: K2 is making it easier to use K2 with SharePoint by making several enhancements to the SharePoint service instance, allowing you to leverage the capabilities of the K2 and SharePoint integration without unnecessary rework and duplication of effort. In this enhancement the Site URL and List ID property is available on all SharePoint list and library SmartObject methods. This means that you can use a single set of SmartObjects across similar SharePoint list and libraries. For example, given List A and List B that share identical columns but are on different SharePoint sub sites, you can use List A's Get List Items method to get a list of items from List B by specifying values for the Site URL and List ID. For further information see the Using SharePoint Data topic.

    Salesforce Service Instance: Added functionality in the Salesforce Service instance to support integration with Salesforce Sandbox. This allows you to have a service instance for the Salesforce test (Sandbox) domain, normal Salesforce domain (login.salesforce.com), and custom domain environments. Use the new Login URL field on the Salesforce Feature Activation page in Management to specify which domain you're connecting to.

  • Exchange Online Service Instance: You can now use the On Behalf of property of the Appointment and Task SmartObjects of the Exchange Online service to create appointments and tasks for specific people from workflows. A workflow will impersonates the user of the email address defined in the On Behalf of parameter to execute the Create method. For further information see the How to create a Exchange Task Form topic.
• Workspace

  • Application Forms: Previously, you needed to mark a form as an Application Form and have the form in the Apps category for the form to appear in the My Forms section in Workspace. Now you only need to flag the form as an Application Form for it to appear in Workspace.

• Package and Deployment
  • Deployment Validation: When deploying SharePoint packages to another SharePoint list, library, or site, you had to ensure that your list and libraries were identical. If they differed slightly by having, for example, an additional column, you could not deploy. This caused issues when deploying to lists or libraries containing additional columns/properties (sometimes even hidden), compared to the source list or library. The validation check on deployment is now less strict, making it possibly now to deploy K2 packages between environments. You can now deploy solutions to a list or library with more properties than the source list, any extra columns in the target SharePoint list or library are ignored if the columns used by the solution are found. For more information see KB002528.

• Breaking Change: When auto-creating SmartObjects from a service instance where there are methods that have the same parameter name, the parameter name was appended with a number to ensure a unique name. This has been changed in K2 Cloud Update 5 which allows the same parameter names across methods. After upgrading and refreshing the service instance or regenerating the SmartObjects for any existing forms, workflows or custom applications dependent on the previous name of the method parameter break as the name is updated. You must manually update the artifacts to use the updated parameter name.

  Service Object Methods	SmartObject Parameter name before Update 5	SmartObject Parameter name after Update 5
  Method: Get User Parameter: User Id	User_Id	User_Id
  Method: Update User Parameter: User Id	User_Id_1	User_Id

Bug fixes are rolled up in each update, K2 Cloud Update 5 includes the following bug fixes:

• K2 Cloud Update 3 Fix Packs 8 to 12
• K2 Cloud Update 4 Fix Packs 1 to 11
• When you use the Remoting MMC tool and click Create Package, a "The format of the URI could not be determined" error occurred.
• When you work in the Designer, the designer timed out and sometimes locked a screen in a specific state.
• When you use the Create Reference Event in the Workflow Designer and the referenced SmartObject contains a "&" in the name, an "Item reference not found" error occurred.
• When you add the URL in the Activation field on the Manage Application Activation page of the Application Catalog and you click Activate, you could not activate K2 on a new site collection.
• When you update a SmartObject using the SmartObject tester tool, the SmartObjects was removed from its original location and added to the location in the SmartObject tester tool.
• When you use the Smartobject REST service to execute a method against the endpoint, a "405 Method Not Allowed" error occurred.
• When you create an Editable List view, save the view and edit it again, you could not move the Toolbar controls.
• When you upgrade to K2 Cloud Update 4, a "Could not successfully execute action 'SourceCode.Data.All.dacpac'. Exception: Could not deploy package." error occurred.
• When you try to open the View Flow of a workflow instance, a "View flow cannot be displayed because the size of this process (Payload Size)" error occurred.

• In the SharePoint service instance certain Without Lookup methods were not functioning.
  Workaround: Install the Microsoft SharePoint April 2018 Update.
• When using K2 to copy items from one SharePoint library to another, for example in a workflow, the original content type is dropped and is set to Document.
  Workaround: There is no known workaround at this time.

• If you are using K2 for SharePoint, re-run the K2 for SharePoint registration wizard after the update.
• The Package and Deployment app is enhanced and you can downloaded it from https://<runtimeurl>/Management/Remote. If you do not have the app yet, log a support ticket and provide your company's Public IP-address ranges so that K2 can allow access to your address range.

• Before upgrading to K2 Cloud Update 5 ensure that all App artifacts found in the category All Items/Apps/K2/Framework/Core, including all child categories of the Core category, are checked in. You cannot successfully upgrade if you have core items checked out.

The following Fix Packs are available for this release.