Weekly feature improvement and bugfix summary

The following feature improvements have been implemented, and bugs fixed in the past week:

Announcements

• From Tuesday, July 15, all product announcements and the monthly product update newsletters will be sent from [email protected]. You may want to update rules in your email client and add the address to your contacts to ensure they reach you as expected.

Inventory

• So far, when admins configured the lifecycle to be filled out mandatorily before a fact sheet can be approved, it didn't cover the specific values. Filling in only one of the lifecycle states (e.g., "Active") was sufficient.

  To ensure users document all relevant information, there are now more granular settings to define what's mandatory. The list of available options for mandatory fields in the meta model's configuration tab "Data Quality" provides the following:

  • "Lifecycle (Any phase mandatory)" for the unchanged behaviour to allow setting the entire lifecycle field as mandatory, and any phase can be filled to approve the quality seal.

  • All individual lifecycle phases (e.g., "Active" or "Phase Out") for the new behaviour of a more fine-grained configuration. But it can't be selected together with the previous option.

  After such a configuration, the mandatory lifecycle phases are listed on the fact sheet side panel as a subset of the lifecycle.

  

• Previously, relating two fact sheets could sometimes trigger an error if the relation was mandatory and was deliberately left empty in the target fact sheet using the "Leave empty" option, and the quality seal was approved for that target fact sheet. This issue has now been fixed, and relations between fact sheets can be established without issues.

• While selecting a value for single-select fields in fact sheets, the drop-down list sometimes overlapped with the content below, causing the background text to interfere and making things hard to read. This issue has been fixed now, and the dropdown is fully opaque for better readability.

Collections

• Earlier this year, we introduced improvements to collections, allowing users with the appropriate permissions to manage collections in the "Manage Collections" overlay without navigating to the administration area. Following this update, collections are moving out of the administration area. You can now import best-practice collections and manage your own in the "Manage Collections" overlay, accessible from the left panel in dashboards, reports, and diagrams.
  A hint in the "Collection" section of the admin area informs admins that this configuration has moved. We will remove the redundant section in a few weeks and notify you in advance.

  

Calculations

• When editing fields on a fact sheet that contribute to a calculation, the target field of the calculation is now instantly updated after saving the change. Previously, this required users to refresh the fact sheet details page. An icon indicating that the calculation progresses may temporarily show up until the result value appears.

  Several of you provided feedback about live updates on fact sheets in other situations, such as automation. We aim to improve the user experience there as well. Unfortunately, this solution can't directly solve those situations. It is currently not one of our strategic focus topics, so it is not planned for the following months.

Reference catalog

We’ve enhanced several user interface elements for managing reference catalog items:

• In the business capability explorer, color coding now indicates which applications are already present in a workspace and which are not, in addition to the linking icon.

• On business capabilities, the card on the side panel for linking a fact sheet to the catalog now matches the style of this element on other fact sheets.

  

Integrations:

• We have extended our REST API's Pathfinder service with new /metaModel endpoints, which allow you to generate a meta model and permissions structure and create new or edit existing entries. You can find further instructions and examples for the /metaModel usage in our OpenAPI Explorer, accessible via "Browse API" from the "About SAP LeanIX" dialog.