Happy New Year everyone! Our first release of 2019 is going to be a big one. We've held off on general releases over peak, but we've been busy behind the scenes and now we've got a boatload of changes waiting to go out the door.
The main focus for this release is going to be bugfixes and some leftover performance / cleanup work that didn't quite make the cut for November, but we've managed to squeeze in some quality of life improvements on Android too.
Note that this release also contains a non-breaking addition to some of our API responses - see 12524 for more info, and our API documentation here for details on our API change release process.
Enhancements:
- We've had a few requests to improve the way search results are presented to users on the Android device, so we've added the ability for you to select the field that you want to sort by when viewing search results. This is available on the item, location, and container searches accessible from the main app screen (3585).
- We've made a couple of user experience improvements to the way we enable / disable buttons or features that require you to be online on Android, for example the button to unlock a locked action. These will now remain visible, but appear disabled (3616, 3617).
- We've made the Android search on purchase orders a bit more sensible - it will now assume that if you search for "5", you want purchase order "5", rather than getting confused and looking through "50", "500", etc. (3627).
- We've been making some major back-end changes to improve the speed and reliability of allocation and deallocation while you're moving goods through the warehouse (9324, 9396).
- In addition to improving the performance of the allocation and deallocation process, we're also working on ways to make deallocation less impactful on the pickers, by being a little smarter about the way we touch actions that would have been affected by the deallocation. You'll see fewer instances of the system cancelling an entire action when you move a single item out of the pick-face (9397).
- We've added some additional logging info to help us resolve issues related to data being sent on event subscriptions (11357).
- We've been building some internal tools to make life a little easier for our support team when you want to enable or disable features on your account (12495).
- We're adding some additional data to our API responses to provide you with a reference that you can quote if you ever need to speak to the support team about a particular API request (12524).
- We know that identifying WiFi problems in the warehouse can be tricky, so we're baking in some network diagnostics to the Android app, so we can capture any connection problems and tie them up with recently scanned location barcodes. This will make a big difference to helping us support you better with any sync problems on the Android device (13277).
- We're still shuffling around some aspects of action creation to speed things up for you - you should see faster action creation on the web, as well as quicker responses on the Android device when requesting another location during a pick (13920).
- We're working our ongoing plan to ensure that you continue to see a stable and high performance Android app as you throw more orders at the system (14215, 15230).
- We're putting the system on a diet after adding so many performance and stability improvements for peak, and we're trimming back a number of back-end processes as we move you onto the latest and greatest versions (14280, 14598).
- We've revamped a lot of the engine responsible for tracking changes inventory and availability. The immediate benefit will be faster and more accurate availability updates, but it also lays the groundwork for easier internal maintenance going forwards (14449).
Bugfixes:
- Fixed a rare bug that could cause the Android app to crash if two people were modifying printer settings on the Android and web app at the same time (3626).
- Fixed a bug on the Android device that caused unexpected search behaviour when the search value contained certain characters like apostrophes (10490).
- Fixed a bug with the Android container despatch process that could incorrectly indicate that a cancelled order was eligible for despatch if it was picked to the same container as a valid sales order (10822).
- Fixed a bug that could prevent the movement of an item from being recorded in movement history when performing a sort action (12234).
- Fixed a rare bug during some pick methods that could result in a location not being presented in the search results, even though it is a valid location and could be scanned (12307).
- Fixed a bug on the Android device that could cause an item movement to be only partially recorded after a Sort action (12494).
- Fixed a bug that prevented the Android app from informing the user about a failed synchronisation (12921).
- Fixed a bug on the Android device that could cause the "Move all" button to become disabled after the user rotates the screen during a Move action (13267).
- We're continuing to make improvements to the engine that drives the despatch process - we've cleaned up a couple of areas that could previously have been generating some hard-to-repro errors during despatch for some users (13966, 13976, 13970).
- Fixed a minor UX bug that would allow users to proceed further through the despatch process than intended for orders that would ultimately hit the stop-ship validation. Users will now hit the validation as soon as they hit the "Pack" button, and be given a chance to move the items off the despatch trolley (13994).
- Fixed a bug with the Repack function on the Android device that could prevent repacked items from being despatched (14115).
- Fixed a minor cosmetic bug with the recent PVX updater release (14186).
- Fixed a bug that affected both the Android and Windows Mobile devices during the "Skip" / "Other Location" workflows, which could cause the picker to be directed back to the location that they just skipped (14249).
- Fixed a rare bug that could block the user from logging in on the Android application if they modified their user settings (14328).
- Fixed some very minor performance slowdowns in the sync process that were accidentally introduced between Android versions 106 and 107 (14366).
- Fixed a bug on the Android device that could cause a Skip on one item to also skip the subsequent picks (14384).
- Fixed a bug that could prevent actions from being created if the "Select all" button was ticked (14400).
- Fixed a bug that could cause overlapping allocation jobs to interfere with one another, which resulted in a delay in orders getting allocated (14954).
- Fixed a confusing error message that could be displayed when attempting to delete a sales order that has been allocated and released for picking (14967).
- Fixed a bug that could cause goods receipt reconciliation on Android to fail to sync (14976).
- Fixed a bug that could cause the Android app to build a new empty database if it lost connection during the initial login process, which could result in some confusing error messages (14978, 14980).
- Fixed a rare bug that could cause the "Other location" search on Android to fail if the WiFi connection was lost and then restored while searching (14982).