20.02 enhancements

BMC Helix Platform is a cloud-based development platform designed for developers and application business analysts to co-develop custom applications and customize purchased applications. 

This section contains information about enhancements in version 20.02 of BMC Helix Platform.

The following video (1:51) provides a summary of the some of the new features and enhancements in BMC Helix Platform version 20.02: 

 https://youtu.be/0KUm8EVS4qg 

Early access preview of the Angular framework for BMC Helix Platform

The UI of BMC Helix Platform is based on the Angular JS framework from Google. Because Angular JS became obsolete, BMC has been upgrading the UI to the latest Angular framework to remain current with emerging market technologies.

BMC is now providing an early access preview of the new Angular framework.

You can preview the Angular framework only with your codeless applications that leverage out-of-the-box view components and actions. The preview is available in your Tailoring and QA environments only. BMC’s custom coded applications and your applications that contain custom code are not supported in the preview.

The preview of Angular framework does not impact your current running applications and services in any environment (specifically production environment).

To see the preview of your codeless applications in the Angular framework launch the following URL:

http://<serverName>/helix/index.html#/<applicationName>

For example: http://<serverName>:8008/helix/index.html#/com.example.taskmanager 

The Angular framework is not supported for the following browsers and actions:

• Internet Explorer 11
• Microsoft Edge non Chromium based version
• Launch Process Designer action

Support for name changes to Categorization and Organization data from Remedy ITSM to BMC Helix Platform

Because the Foundation data model differs between Remedy IT Service Management (Remedy ITSM) and BMC Helix Platform, data corresponding to some Remedy ITSM Foundation data mappings were not loaded to BMC Helix Platform. 

BMC Helix Platform supports the updates made to the following Foundation data by using the data wizard:

• Company Name
• Person Name
• Login ID
• Operational Categorization
• Product Categorization
• Site Name
• Site Information
• Support Group

As an administrator, you can modify the supported Foundation data in Remedy ITSM by using the data wizard. The changes are synchronized in BMC Helix Platform.

For more information about the supported name changes and the limitations, see Foundation data synchronization from Remedy ITSM Data Wizard to BMC Helix Platform.

BMC crawler to include articles from Remedy Knowledge Management in IBM Watson Discovery

To include articles from Remedy Knowledge Management in cognitive insights, you can use the BMC crawler, an easy way to crawl articles from Remedy Knowledge Management. You can include the crawled articles in cognitive insights provided by BMC Helix Chatbot or any other custom application. 

After you install and configure the BMC crawler utility, it creates an environment and data collection in your IBM Watson Discovery instance automatically. After crawling, the Remedy Knowledge Management articles are automatically added to the data collection. 

The BMC crawler utility supports only Remedy Knowledge Management data for now and is not a generic crawler for any other database or file system. For more information about installing and configuring the BMC crawler, see Installing and configuring the cognitive search data crawler for Remedy Knowledge Management articles.

The following image is an example of the collection created in IBM Watson Discovery and the number of articles crawled from Remedy Knowledge Management:

Enhancing an Extension Container view component to support fields from the same record definition

BMC Helix Platform has enhanced the Extension Container component to allow additional custom fields to be included directly from the record definition to which you have added these additional fields. You no longer need to add an extension association definition (direct association between the extension record definition and the record definition that is not customizable) to include the custom fields in View designer.

For example, you have created a Passport information record and added a custom field Passport Number. You can create an extension view to include the passport numbers of all employees by using this Passport information record in the Extension Container view component.

Using the same extension record definition ensures that the new customizations are not lost when your application or platform is upgraded.

For information about extending the application definitions or Foundation definitions, see Extending BMC Helix Platform Foundation definitions.

Support for new Date and String functions in Expression Editor

BMC Helix Platform now provides new Date and String functions in Expression Editor of Process and Rule designer. As a developer or application business analyst, you no longer need to create a custom code to use these Date and String functions. You can use these functions in your processes and rules when defining qualification criteria or building field values. 

The following Date and String functions are added in  BMC Helix Platform:

Date functions:

• DATE
• DATEADD
• DATEDIFF
• DATEPARSE

String functions:

• GENERATEGUID
• HASHCODE
• INDEXOF
• LENGTH
• LOWER
• REPLACE
• REPLACEALL
• SPLIT
• STARTSWITH
• SUBSTRING
• UPPER

Support to set preferred user and global language

BMC Helix Platform introduces the option to set your preferred language to render the user interface. 

With this support:

• As a developer, you can enable your end users to set a preferred locale by selecting any of the supported locales. For the changes to take affect, log out and log back in to BMC Helix Platform.

• As an administrator, you can make the user interface consistent across an organization by enforcing a global locale for all users. The global locale takes precedence over the user preferred locale or the browser locale. For more information on setting the Preferred-User-Locale for the global language setting, see Updating centralized tenant configuration settings.
• In the absence of global language settings and user preferred locale, the UX interface is rendered using the browser locale. 

Following image is an example of how to set the preferred language:

Enhanced record grid filters to support filtering with partial strings 

BMC Helix Platform provides the option to filter records with partial strings by using the wildcard character %. When you filter a record grid with partial strings, the records that completely or partially match the partial string are displayed. For more information, see Filter the record grid with partial strings.

Configurable states for the record editor

As a developer, you can set the default state for a record editor as read-only or edit, and define whether a record can be edited or not. For more information, see To configure the default state for the record editor.

Support for Joins on external records 

It is now possible to join an external record with a regular record. It is also possible to join two external records. For example, in an application, you can render a Grid View component to display the combined record. For more information, see Creating external record definitions and Creating join record definitions.