round-up: versions 15.2.1 - 15.3.5

Layout-8000 versions 15.2.1 - 15.3.5
12/14/2015 - 3/21/2016

Products page

• if the user presses the "Remove Product" button, a product was selected, but the highlight is on some other product, a dialog appears asking if he wants to delete the selected product, the highlighted product or neither. Both products are identified at the top of the dialog.
• When the user leaves the main Layout workstation dialog, a pop-up may ask if the user wants to restart instead of leaving Layout. This is similar to a pop-up that appeared in Layout-8000 version 14. The appearance of this pop-up is based on a user preference.  By default, the pop-up does not appear; Layout just exits.  To change this, go to the Product Page tab in User Preferences and check the field labeled "Confirm when leaving Layout".

Get Ads

• When "Get Ads" is configured to transfer ads by SFTP, the "Directory" field is optional.
• Increased the length of the "Node Name" field from 20 to 40 characters.
• The "Interface Tool" menu entry works.
• The "Ad Entry" menu respects security settings.
• In XML files, an ad may request up to 75 zones.
• When Layout-8000 checks for new or changed ads, there is a special case that we no longer consider to be a Zone Difference. (1) According to the cardex.txt file, the ad is common. (2) The ad was previously common. (3) Someone zoned the ad in the Design & Dummy area. (4) The ad is alive in every zone. (5) In Global Layout Settings on the "Interface" tab, an administrator checked "Hide differences for common ads that someone zoned."

Design & Dummy area

• Improved placement of color, double truck and other types of ads. For more information, please read the attached hand-outs.
• Prevented Layout-8000 from hanging when the user deletes all pages in the currently displayed zone.
• Pages may be unzoned from the "Pages" menu.
• The "More details" button on the "Ad" tab modifies the correct Insertion record for a rezoned ad.
• When a user presses the "Edit" button next to the "Colors" field on the "Ad" tab, the correct color information is loaded into the dialog.
• Products that are sent to SCS for technical support have a higher probability of reaching SCS.
• When an ad is double-clicked, it correctly bubbles up to the top of the page's ad stack.
• When dropping an ad on a page, request conflicts are reported on the Status line.
• In the ad list, the "Group Req", "Group Alt" and "Group Alt2" columns show the requested group, even when the group is not used and has no pages assigned to it. This is consistent with the ad list's Request column and previous versions of the ad list.
• The ad list's Request column shows page requests, even when they are invalid. For example, if an ad requests page 5 of a group named Jaffrey that contains only 1 page, the ad list's Request column will show "JAFFREY-5".
• When someone creates an advertising block, a period (.) is permitted in the "Item ID" field.
• You may set a default parent zone. This optional setting applies to zoned products whose zones lack parent/child relationships.
• On the Page menu, the Logical Names menu entry populates an outext database table, which is used at sites that have configured the CCI XML interface to create empty page slots.
• Improved validation of the Ad Vendor ID field on three forms. Layout-8000 will automatically remove spaces from an Ad Vendor ID. Letters are forced to uppercase. That is consistent with how ad IDs are handled.
• Added a user preference that affects the "Unplace inner scope items" toolbar button.
  
  The preference is on the Design & Dummy tab of the user preferences dialog. That's a new tab that replaces the AdBoss tab.  The only thing on that tab was "Enable MABLight", but MetaAdBoss isn't used anymore.
  
  The preference is specified using a radio button.
              When unplacing inner scope items:
                 o Always unplace blocks
                 o Never unplace blocks
                 o Unplace blocks if there are no non-blocks to unplace
  
  The default behavior is the current behavior, Any blocks that are not locked or on a locked page are unplaced.
  
  If the user chooses Never unplace blocks, no block is unplaced; only ads and fillers that are not locked and not on a locked page are unplaced.
  
  With the last choice, the behavior depends on whether there are any ads and fillers to unplace.  If so, pressing the toolbar button unplaces only ads and fillers and not any blocks.  If not, pressing the toolbar button unplaces blocks.  To unplace everything with this option, press the button once to unplace ads and fillers, then press it again to unplace blocks.

Reports

• When emailing a report, a numeric keypad may be used to type numbers in the message body.
• Because Classic PGL is obsolete, its menu item has been removed from the Reports menu.
• On servers with multiple Layout-8000 instances that share SCS tools, the email address book has been made backward-compatible with Layout-8000 versions as old as version 14.11.6.

Send to Pagination

• When someone placed half of a double truck ad on a page and left the other half unplaced, "Send to Pagination" reported differences in "diffgeom.log". An error message popped up because Layout-8000 could not create a "/u/compare" directory. Both halves of the double truck ad were incorrectly combined in SCS XML files like "l8kout.xml". All of these bugs are fixed.

Send to Pagination - CCI XML Interface

• CCI XML files once again have AdExtensionFields named AccountNo, Earlug and Island.
• When someone sent a brand new product to CCI from within the "Design & Dummy" area, a message popped up: "pagemap2 table is empty." To prevent this issue, "Send to Pagination" populates the pagemap2 table.

Setup

• Product and Template Schedules have additional instructions to guide you on how to use the list and dialog.
• Restored a "Custom Fields" menu entry on the "Maintenance" menu. This menu entry allows administrators to select custom fields for the Design & Dummy area's ad list.
• The "Printer Maintenance" menu's security group changed from HIDE to LAYOUT ADMIN.

Maintenance

• Layout-8000 automatically cleans up product locks. Every night, Layout-8000 goes through the product lock data and removes any lock for which there is no process matching the process ID part of the lock's record.
• Corrected hot keys for a pop-up choice during the "Purge Products" process.

Maintenance - Database Ranges

• Database Ranges may be exported to a spreadsheet or CSV file. Previously, only the currently active list (e.g. groups) could be exported. It is now possible to export all Database Ranges. CSV file names are based upon the range that was exported.
• The export and import features have become more consistent in how they represent ordinals. In exported CSV files, ordinals are consistent with what appears on screen when the interface type is set to trans.dat.
• Database Ranges prevents a user from manually entering group ordinal 01 in trans.dat interfaces. The "Import spreadsheet" feature similarly forbids entry of group ordinal 01.
• Corrected default colors. On a brand new server, the first three colors are (1) FULL, (2) BW and (3) X.

High Availability (HA) Mirroring

• When a system administrator ran "mkprime", a CentOS Linux 7 server incorrectly reported that users were logged into the other server. That was a false alarm and has been corrected.
• When a system administrator runs "mkprime", that triggers a series of tests on both servers. We have improved how each server shares its test results with the other server, thus avoiding a "unary operator" error.
• Before shutting down a server, an administrator may specify that mkprime or mksec should not be run during the next restart. This involves an "/etc/reboot.conf" file.
• Improved monitoring of database replication.
• The following LayoutHistoryAdBoss tables use transaction-level database replication: prabact, prabnoact, prabsummary, prabrules.
• The Mirror kit installs three new files in /etc/mirror: (1) mirror.must_exclude, (2) cron.must_exclude and (3) dr.must_exclude. These files contain lists of directories and files that must be excluded from Mirroring. Unlike mirror.exclude, cron.exclude and dr.exclude, the .must_exclude files are not to be customized. There is a comment to that effect at the top of each file.

Tools

• SCS's Queue Manager has an improved startup and shutdown process. It takes less time. Consequently, Layout-8000 servers boot, reboot and shut down faster.

Installation

• Installs the EPEL repository on CentOS Linux 7.
• Corrected the list of required packages on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
• Improved initialization of the Environment Manager.
• Improved conversion of Email Address Book data from old versions of Layout-8000.
• Spice toolkits are better maintained on a Mirrored pair of servers, making it easier to determine which tools were installed where. The "/u/install/installed_toolkits" directory contains kits that were installed on this server. Installation log files are preserved for both servers.
• For a given kit name (e.g., common), instead of installing for the first file that has extension .tar, .tar.Z, .tar.gz, .tgz, or .tar.bz2, in that order, scsinstall now installs the newest file with one of those extensions.
• The "xml2json" program is automatically downloaded from the scssupport.com web site instead of ftp.newspapersystems.com using a new SPM package management tool.

Handouts